Google Wave was presented as the answer to all our online communication prayers back in 2009. Google created a service that would make it easier for users to work and communicate, but now a year later the service will be phased out.
Google Wave was an online tool that connected e-mail, chat program and document handling in one and the same portal. The information was stored in “waves” that enabled many users to communicate about the material inside the wave.
Only two and a half months after the first official version of Wave Google has decided to release the code to the open source community since it won’t be doing any further development on its own. The interest and number of users have been too small and too few and shows how Google can sometimes fail too.
Parts of the code making up Google Wave will be, and is already, used by other services at Google, but will also be available to others that want to power on and make something personal of the Wave code.
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.
The developers working with Wave will now be moving on to new projects, but exactly what only the eightball can tell.
Looking back it seems the users couldn’t quite grasp the possible advantages of the communication system that Wave used. The fact remains that it is a bit tricky to understand how Wave really works and how it would replace other kinds of communication, which is perhaps the biggest problem of all.
