[LINK] Google Waves Goodbye

[Roger Clarke]

[Okay, make that 'Google Wave's Goodbye'.  Isn't English wonderful?]

[Feel vindicated, Tom?]


Update on Google Wave
8/04/2010 02:00:00 PM
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive 
breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our 
users' lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer 
preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and 
collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web 
browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the 
ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even "playback" the 
history of changes-all within a browser. Developers in the audience 
stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we 
weren't quite sure how users would respond to this radically 
different kind of communication. 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.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen 
the user adoption we would have liked. We don't plan to continue 
developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will 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. In addition, we will work on tools 
so that users can easily "liberate" their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways 
in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are 
excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create 
innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider 
web.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University