Google Wave-s no more

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, drag-and-drop files from the desktop, and playback service on the history of changes within a browser.

These functions are now available as open source, and Google is handing them to customers and partners to further develop the platform on their own.