Google has announced in a blog post that they will discontinue their innovative communication platform - Google Wave. When it was launched, Google Wave created a hype, perhaps, never seen before anything that else that Google has launched before (or is the hype because of twitter?). Invites for Google Wave as at a premium and there some people even resorted to selling invites in in Ebay.

Despite all the expectations and hype surrounding it, Wave did not live upto the expectations of users as well as Google themselves. For users, Wave was seen as being too complex. Although a lot of users signed up for it, the number of people who actually used it was very low. Too low for Google's taste.

Wave is a great technology. The fact that Google is discontinuing should not be interpreted as a complete failure of the Google Wave project. Although, Wave will not exist as a standalone project, the technology will no doubt find its way into other Google products.

This is what Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, wrote:

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.