Google announced Tuesday it was discontinuing seven products as part of an effort to streamline the company, including Google Wave, a chat-email hybrid introduced in 2009 that was supposed to revolutionize online communications, but never really caught on.
On Wednesday, Google sent out a mournful final email to users of the service (including yours truly, although I hadn’t ridden the Wave in quite a while) thanking them for testing the product and informing them of the steps needed to preserve their Wave conversations.
Here’s the email message Google Sent out:
Dear Wavers,More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.
If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.
For more details, please see our help center.
Yours sincerely,
The Wave Team
A number of theories have been proposed as to why Google Wave, like so many of the company’s products outside of search (cough cough, Google Buzz) didn’t work out.
I have one, too, of course: Google Wave’s editable, real-time conversation threading — which allowed users to go back to earlier messages (waves) and respond to them by injecting messages immediately following them vertically — was an innovative idea on paper, but in practice it didn’t make much sense.
That’s not how people read anything really, by jumping around from place to place, except maybe a “Choose Your Own Adventure” Novel.”
I think it could have worked had Google Wave simply had a primarily horizontal orientation, with responses to earlier waves appearing vertically below the original wave.
Still, it remains to be seen whether Google harvests any of the innovations of Wave for future products, perhaps even something in Google + Chat.
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
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