Google Wave flatlines: no plans to further develop standalone product, future is in other Google services

Wave goodbye (sorry, we couldn't resist) to Google's "community collaboration" tool. In a post on Google's official blog, Senior VP of Operations Urs Hölzle has announced there are "[no] plans to continue developing Wave as standalone product." Blame it on a lower-than-desired user adoption rate, he says, all the while praising the learning experience and innovative tools it fostered. The site will reportedly be maintained "at least through the end of the year," with no promises beyond that, and tools will be eventually released "so that users can easily 'liberate' their content from Wave." We said early on that many of Wave's best ideas seemed better fit integrated into existing Google products like Docs and Gmail, and the company seems to agree: it plans to "extend the technology for use in other Google projects." We look forward to it, but in the meantime, a moment of silence for Google Maps co-founders Lars and Jens Rasmussen's now-fallen experiment.

[lilboy Posted Aug 5th 2010 4:51AM]

@lilboy my comments is my own before looking on to the comments above me.similarities

[LSE Posted Aug 5th 2010 8:51AM]

buzz is probably next. Google is becoming too much like MS. focusing on too many things at once and failing to execute them by losing to nimbler companies or failing to understand the market. They should return to what they do best before they become a slow behemoth like MS that tries to do everything. Knol and Jaiku should also get chopped. Picasa never went anywhere either.

Orkut 2.0 masked as googleme facebook me-too is pretty much the last chance they have to expand outside search and with facebook having half a billion user head start it is questionable if it will not just be a buzz 2.0.

[AndrewSittermann Posted Aug 5th 2010 9:33AM]

It's a real shame. The real-time multi-user apps supported by wave have a great future. We have a Google Wave travel-planner called "Travel WithMe",
and people love the real-time experience.

Sensing that wave might not be going places, we've put it on facebook now as well, but still with Google Wave's realtime features. It's at apps.facebook.com/travel-withme.

[darkshine Posted Aug 5th 2010 9:40AM]

As long as they Open-Source it all like they said they would I don't really mind - I can think of a few great projects for this Wave stuff :D

[glissemaster Posted Aug 5th 2010 11:43AM]

I liked Wave. I think if they had made it compatible with regular e-mail, it would have caught on. It was billed as an e-mail replacement, but wasn't backwards compatible.

[S4Rs Posted Aug 5th 2010 1:19PM]

I will say that the concept how google wave works, should be how forums work. To be able to see the order at which posts are made and played out would be great, and it would be easy to see all the branches of a thread where people are replying to specific quotes and questions vs. regular entries that add to the posts main points.
It would also be easy enough to search for a topic that is actually answered in a branch of some other thread as a tangent. It sucks when you need to figure out something, and the only threads are 250 plus pages long, and most of it is people asking the same questions over and over, or people complaining about not using the search feature or reading the whole thread first.