Wave goodbye

So, Google Wave will soon be no more:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, 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.

I guess it was always a technology looking for a problem to solve. However, I did think they might have tried pushing it into organisations a bit before giving up – it seemed a potentially really powerful tool for collaboration amongst teams, and Wave hasn’t been a part of the Google Apps suite for that long.

Word is though that Google are working on a Facebook style social network and maybe some of the Wave stuff will make it into that.

I guess the other thing is that at least they are open sourcing bits of the code, so someone else might be able to pick it up and do something useful with it.

Thanks to Google, then, for innovating and trying new stuff publicly, and not being afraid to fail. A lesson to us all.