Google Wave Waving Good Bye

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. 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.

via Official Google Blog: Update on Google Wave.

Let's pause for a moment of silence to remember Google Wave, a service that has gone off to greener pastures. Google confirmed the news late yesterday, saying the service hadn't seen the type of user adoption it had been hoping for.

The news is not all bad for Google, though; just this morning, iSuppli released new Android sales stats, and the numbers look pretty good. In fact, they look great. iSuppli's researchers say that Android's market share will surpass that of Apple's iOS by 2012, at which point Google's mobile OS will be used in 75 million smartphones.

via PC World

As PC World points out, there have been some other interesting Google projects that didn't fly.  Google Buzz  a Twitter like service that was  hit with a lawsuit. Google Fast Flip, a news reading feature where you flip through a stack of pages. Neat, but it takes more time than scanning a list of headlines. Google TV, where you control your TV with your Google Android phone ... after purchasing some extra hardware. ( This could still fly, I'd say.) And Google Me, a rumored "Facebook Killer".  Will 500 million facebook users migrate over to Google? Seems doubtful. If Google interfaced with Facebook and provided more features, perhaps.