Wave goodbye: Google cans collaboration tool after low adoption

Google has canned Wave as a standalone product due to lack of user interest, but the web-based real-time communication and collaboration tool will continue to live on as part of other initiatives.

Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations and Google Fellow said in a blog yesterday that the search giant no longer planned to "continue developing Wave as a standalone product" as it had "not seen the user adoption we would have liked".

But he added that the firm would "maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects". The offering enables users to share text, images, videos and the like in real-time.

Key parts of the Wave code such as drag-and-drop functionality and character-by-character live typing have already been made available to the open source community so that further development of product can continue. But Hoelzle promised that Google would also build tools to help existing users remove their content from Wave for use elsewhere.

More...