Google pulls plug on Wave

Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations and Google fellow, posted, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product.”

Google Wave was released in 2009 as a social networking platform. It is a media rich platform for people to share photos, videos and text messaging. It banks on the idea of real time communications.

Google Wave's selling points include character-by-character live typing, so people can work on documents together. It was designed to recreate email as if it had been invented for the way we work now, rather than 20 years ago. Other selling points include drag-and-drop files from the desktop and a playback service on the history of changes within a browser. 

The search giant says that the Google Wave experiment has not been a waste of time, with parts of the code developed for the site now available as open source.

Google is shortly expected to reveal details of a social network site called Google Me, widely reported to be a competitor to Facebook. It has already invested money in Zynga, which makes games that are played by social network users online, and tomorrow (6 August), it is tipped to be saying it has bought a stake in a social gaming site called Slide.

It also said that it would use what it had learnt in other projects, which is widely thought to be Google Me.