Google will officially kill Wave in April 2012

Google which announced in April last year that they would not develop Google Wave as a stand-alone project, sent a mailer out to Wave users on Friday, saying that the service which was mantained for all of 2011, will be taken off cyberspace in April 2012. Wave was essentially a web app for real time communication and collaboration, and features included character-by-character live typing,the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, and even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Despite initial excitement among the ’early adopter’ community however, the product failed to gain traction and it was decided that it was not worth pursuing it as a stand alone project any further. The full text of the letter is below: [caption id=“attachment_139838” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Google Wave logo”]  [/caption] More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012. If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012. For more details, please see our help center. Yours sincerely, The Wave Team