Google announced today that it was shutting down its Wave division. The technology was designed to create applications where users could chat, edit documents, videos and photos, and play games together.
“We were jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication,” wrote Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow. “The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.”
“But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked, he continued. 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.”
“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”
Source: Google Blog
