Google waves goodbye to Wave

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Search giant Google Inc. said on Wednesday that it is pulling the plug on its online collaboration service 'Google Wave' owing to lack of user interest.

Google had launched the Australian-developed web application amid much fanfare last year with an idea to merge email, online chat, social networking and "wiki" style group access to web pages or documents.

“We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, Operations & Google Fellow, in a blog post.

Though the project was cheered by developers, and also it had many loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption that Google would have liked, he said.

Hölzle said Google does not plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but the search giant would maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

“The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began,” he added.

Meanwhile, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tried to paint the failure of Google Wave as a sign that the company's innovative culture continues to take risks and aim big.

“Our policy is we try things,” a CNET report quoted Schmidt as saying. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.”

Schmidt said the company likes to let the market determine which products are worthy of further investment and then re-invest in the ones that catch on.