Google has officially announced that it will no longer be developing Wave as a standalone product, citing a lack of user adoption.
Google's real-time collaboration platform nearly drowned in hype even before it was opened up to beta testing. Once users got their hands on the platform, countless software products were declared to be dead by Google's hand.
There's no doubt Wave's technology and the feature set it enabled were truly innovative. But when the smoke cleared and Wave was opened to the public, it quickly became obvious that this was a product built by engineers, for engineers.
Though the crowd at I/O may have gone wild with ecstasy, even Google has now admitted that Wave and its "radically different kind of communication" was just too much of an odd duck. The combination of different tools and paradigms for collaboration ended up with a product too confusing for most users.
Google says that it plans to maintain the site (wave.google.com) "at least through the end of this year." Keep an eye out for our forthcoming roundup of alternatives for users who will be left high and dry when Wave is killed permanently.
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