Google’s Wave Crashes To Shore
The internet giant announced today it would pull the plug on the Australian-developed tool that once promised a radically different approach to electronic messaging.
Wave was the brainchild of Google Australia’s Lars Rasmussen and, when it launched last year, it generated a huge amount of buzz because of the innovative way it allowed people to communicate in groups. At one stage much-sought-after invitations to join the platform were being traded for $US70 on eBay.
Wave combines email and instant messaging in a way that fosters the sharing of rich content such as documents, maps, images and video and has attracted a small number of loyal followers around the world. The Chaser team also recently began using the tool to write comedy sketches after initially panning it for its apparent complexity, but the company failed to win over a more mainstream audience.
Urs Hölzle, a senior vice-president of operations at Google said in a blog post today: “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.”