Google kills Wave

In an announcement on the Google Blog, Urs Hoelzle eulogizes Google Wave. The site will be live through the end of the year, and Google is going to try to move the technology to other projects. Personally, I tried to use Google Wave a couple times, but was never really able to get used to it. It was hard!

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.

This was going to be a separate post, but what the hey. For those of you concerned or curious about the amount of data Google’s getting on you, Jamie Wilkinson has put together a Firefox add-on that will alert you audibly and visually whenever your information is being sent to Google.

(Thanks, Greg)

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