Google has announced the closure of Wave, the real time communication and collaboration app it launched last year.
The company said that the web app has not proved as popular as it hoped, though it hopes to reuse the technology in other of its projects.
“The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, Operations, adding that the drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing code are already available to other developers as open source.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said this means that Wave will carry on, but not as a standalone product.
“We’re taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced,” he said at the Techonomy conference in Tahoe, California. “It’s a very clever product and we liked it what it could do. We try things and remember we celebrate our failures. It’s absolutely OK to try something very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning from that and then apply it to something new.”
Born out of a side project by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the engineers behind Google Maps, Google Wave was conceived as a tool for creating “waves” — equal parts conversation and document — where people could communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and other content.
