A little over a year after it was launched, Google announced that they’re pulling the plug on their Wave product – the emailing, instant messaging, and picture-sharing progeny that was suppose to change the landscape of collaborative, online content. Google Wave allowed users to communicate in real-time and share documents, videos, and re-make epic Pulp Fiction scenes. If you haven’t heard of Google Wave you’re not alone. That’s one reason Google Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Hölzle, cites for Wave’s fate:
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. [Google]
Though the product itself will likely be forgotten by the time Apple launches its next iPhone model, Google Wave has truly paved the way for many of tomorrow’s web apps. The principles we’ve seen with Wave will be resurfaced and the ability to drag-and-drop files from your desktop, playback the history of document changes and show real-time, character-by-character typing is just the beginning.
And don’t worry: Google isn’t sitting on their hands with rolling out functionality that proved useful from Wave. Better spell-check and drag-and-drop have already been ported into Gmail, while improvements to real-time collaboration in Google Docs seem to be happening on a very consistent basis.









