So long and thanks for all the fish! That’s the message today from Google to it’s Wave product. Google has announced it’s killing off the web app which was supposed to be a new way for people to interact and combine email, instant messaging, blog publishing, wiki collaboration et all, into one message system. Wave isn’t really even that old — it was announced at last year’s Google I/O.
Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations @ Google had this to say in a blog post:
“The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.
But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”
I suspect Google realized Wave just wasn’t going to play a big role in their quest for world dominion and decided to go back to work on that death ray we’ve been hearing about.
OK, I could be a bit smug here considering this was another app touted to be an email killer, but I’m going to take the highroad and give em credit for taking this hound out back of the shed. I guess you could say that Google has beached the Wave.
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