Google still intends to shut down Google Wave, its ambitious real-time collaboration tool, April 30. Users have until then to export their individual waves.
Google still
plans to shut off its ill-fated Google Wave on April 30. The real-time
collaboration tool, designed to merge email, wikis and other forms of
communication into a single wave, never enjoyed the consumer traction of other
Google products such as Gmail. The search-engine giant subsequently released a
considerable portion of the source code as open-source software.
Google Wave
is now in read-only mode, read part of a Google email sent to former Wave
users. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the
existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off.
Current
open-source projects based on Wave include
Apache Wave.
Users can also rely on Walkaround to import Waves from wave.google.com, in
theory allowing work with the program past that April 30 shutdown date.
Walkaround supports features such as in-line replies, wave gadgets, attachments
and full-text search, but does not support Wave extensions or folder
management.
Google once
had high hopes for Wave. In early 2010, executives announced plans to integrate
Wave features into other Google products, although it remained unclear how
exactly such an initiative would take shape. By then, Google had confirmed to
eWEEK that some 1 million people were
actively using the service.
However, there
were also some complaintsincluding one from
blogger Anil Dashthat Google Waves complexity
made it unpalatable to third-party programmers looking to write collaboration
applications. By August 2010, it also seemed as if customers werent
gravitating toward the platform in numbers sufficient for Google, which decided
to stop building Wave as a standalone product.
What happened
was we liked the UI and we liked a lot of the new features in it, but it didnt
get enough traction, Googles then-CEO Eric Schmidt told media during the
Techonomy conference that month. So were taking those technologies and
applying them to new technologies that are not announced. So, basically, well
get the benefits of Google Wave but not as a separate product.
Now, the last
vestiges of Wave, at least as a Google product, seem primed to implode, as
well.
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