I got my Google Wave account on day 1 of its life. It was definitely interesting and evolutionary, but I never thought it was going to take hold. It was just too slow. I used it for a couple projects and it was OK, but far from the best way to collaborate for those particular projects. I’m glad Google works on stuff like Wave and puts it out there for users to try. Some of their stuff is awesome… like Gmail and Reader… and some things won’t be sustainable… like Wave. Wave is dead, but the project was far from a “failure”. The experiences and code produced as a result will live on in other ways.
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.
