Is Google Killing Wave?

Google Wave arrived on the tech scene with much fanfare, but really, was a shiny new toy that bloggers, blogging communities, tech geeks and folks in a collaborative business environment got excited about.

However, the adoption just isn't there. The hype around the service has died down to a whisper and in a blog post by the company, there are hints that the service might be axed...sort of.

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.

Did you catch the second line at at? If you didn't, let me repeat it:

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.

So, maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects?

What do you really mean Google? Well, here's my guess: the company has realized that no one really uses Wave. The adoption is brutally slow and isn't getting any better any time soon. In fact, it's probably a bigger bust than Google Buzz.

However, my guess is that the technology behind the service will make its way into Google Docs and possibly GMail. It would be nice to see this happen for consumers, but my real guess is that it'll be fused in with Google Apps for those leveraging the cloud services for business.

So, what do you think of Google Wave? What about its future?

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