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Google has ended support for its Google Wave real-time collaboration and communication because of a lack of users.
Google has confirmed that it will no longer be developing Google Wave following disappointing take-up among users

Google, which unveiled Wave at its annual I/O developer conference last year to whoops and cheers, said that it would no longer be working on the real-time collaboration and communication tool.

The company acknowledged that despite huge internal excitement over the possibilities offered by Wave, users did not display the same enthusiasm.

“Google Wave set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser,” wrote Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations at Google in a blog post.

“We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop – even “playback” the history of changes.

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

“But despite numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product.”

Hölzle said that Google would continue to support the product until at least the end of this year, and would enable the technology that underpinned Wave to be used in other Google projects, and by third-party developers. He also said that Google would develop a tool to help existing Wave users to “liberate” any content they had archived in Wave so it could be saved elsewhere.

“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,” said Hölzle. “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.”

Although many in the technology industry had long believed Google Wave was underperforming, the news that Google was ending support for one of its most innovative new products came as a surprise to most.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, played down the significance of the Wave announcement. “Our policy is, we try things,” he told delegates at a technology conference in Lake Tahoe, California.

“We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.”