Just saw the official Google announcement that Google won’t be continuing with Google Wave in the future:
‘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.’
from The Official Google Blog.
The curious thing is that Google is building a legacy of projects which attempt to utilise social tools, but then end up losing dedicated effort or closing.
Jaiku
Lively
I just never understood precisely what Google Wave was, or what it was for! Google has so many wonderful tools, Alerts and Docs just to name a couple. And their search engine is second to none! Love Chrome. But lets not just invent stuff for the sake of. You know? God bless!