They say, ‘Everything that has a beginning has an end’. Well, for Google Wave, it came a bit too early.
The Google Wave application that provided services like computing platform, and communications protocol to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking is about to shut down due to lack of patronage. Launched in May last year, this software was described as a 
new web application for real-time communication and collaboration. The decision was taken on august 4, after Wave failed to make the desired mark in the industry.
“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. So 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,”
said Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of operations.
Although Google Wave changed the way people communicated online, its active users keep dropping drastically until Google finally decided to shelve it. Even as most users did not even know what Google Wave was all about, the search engine giant has already decided to come up with new products.
Company CEO Eric Schmidt on a YouTube video said that the Wave team would be looking towards moving other products that are
“like Wave but applied in some other areas.”
Though its time for Wave to say goodbye, it will benefit Google’s so-called Facebook competitor, Me. In fact Wave will help a lot of social networking sites.
When Wave debuted in May, PCWorld’s Ed Albro said that Wave could be a great answer for
“sharing content with only the people you choose.”
It allowed picking specific people to include sharing your content with in a Wave quickly and easily in a manner similar to creating group e-mail whereas with Facebook one can only restrict posts based on settings.
Despite the application being scrapped, Wave’s Website wave.google.com will remain live at least till the end of the year. Google also plans on creating tools that will make it easy for users to export data out of Google Wave.
Even after abandoning the project, Google boss Eric Schmidt has tagged Wave, as
“a very clever product”.
Perhaps he is trying to cover up for the slump.
“Our policy is we try things,”
he stated.
“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.”
It would be interesting to see how the giant search engine will recover from the loss and apply the Wave benefits to its other upcoming applications.
