Google Wave wipes out

A screenshot from Google Wave.

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Google's Wave has crashed to shore as the internet giant announced today it would pull the plug on the Australian-developed tool that once promised a radically different approach to electronic messaging.

Wave was the brainchild of Google Australia's Lars Rasmussen, and when it first launched last year it generated a huge amount of buzz because of the innovative way it allowed people to communicate in groups. At one stage much-sought-after invitations to join the platform were being traded for US$70 (NZ$95) on eBay.

Wave combines email and instant messaging in a way that fosters the sharing of rich content such as documents, maps, images and video and has attracted a small number of loyal followers around the world.

The Chaser team also recently began using the tool to write comedy sketches after initially panning it for its apparent complexity, but the company failed to win over a more mainstream audience.

Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president of operations at Google said in a blog post today "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."

In a recent interview, Rasmussen said Wave had suffered significant teething problems.

"We had a lot of interest after we first showed a demo and then when we got it out into peoples' hands there was a fair bit of disappointment because it didn't change the world overnight.

"It was very immature - buggy and crashy and slow. But primarily it was new and people didn't quite know what to do with it."

The complexity of the concept may have contributed to its downfall. When it was first suggested to Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2007, he said he thought Wave sounded "kind of crazy".

This is the second failed attempt for the company to break out of email into more collaborative social platforms. Its Buzz social networking platform failed to fly after the company breached the privacy of its Gmail users by making their contact lists public to other subscribers.

Google Australia said today it was working on finding new roles for the Wave team.

- © Fairfax NZ News