After around one year of testing, Google will drop the axe on Wave this year due to a lack of adoption.
Google in its official blog just announced that it has stopped development of its real-time collaboration and communication platform Google Wave. According to Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations at Google wrote “We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser.” He also added “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.”

Its a really sad to see Google Wave go away so quickly. We all had such high hopes from the game changing product when it was first announced last year. What is left to be seen is what is the wave team going to develop next. Is it going to be a new product or who knows they are working on ‘Google Me‘ – a much rumored social networking product from Google.

We all will miss you Wave.