Last night I received this sad but expected email from the Google Wave Team. I remember using Wave for the first time as soon as it was available. I remember getting the feeling this was going to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Bloggers and designers seemed excited about this new thing and were soon declaring that the days of the email as we knew it were numbered. But we all soon realized the thing was too buggy and Google didn’t seem to take care of it. As a result, the non-geeky audience never got excited about Wave and those of us who used it lost interest.
This is another example of why a good idea without good implementation is nothing. It’s just an idea and not a product.
Goodbye Wave. It was good to meet you.
Dear Wavers,
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012. If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012. For more details, please see our help center. Yours sincerely, The Wave Team
