It was hyped as the future of text-based communication, but a year later Google’s brainchild is no more. It has been announced that development on Wave is to be stopped, eventually leading to the project being shut down. Why? Because it never caught on the way it was supposed to. Some of its technology, like the drag-and-drop feature (which was good), will live on as open source. Don’t worry, coming soon will be export tools so that you can get your data out before Wave is over for good by the end of this year.

I only used Wave for a little while, which is what most people did as it could adequately serve the functions of email, instant messenger, or a live demo … but it was never the ideal solution for any of them. Let us not forget how incredibly resource-intensive it was with large numbers of people on a Wave, which was a pity, because sharing info to big groups in real time, with the replay saved for sharing later, was arguably its strong suit.

I suppose one good thing from Wave’s last breath is how much time the creative Google personnel will now have to move on to the next big thing. After only a few months following its release, it was obvious that Wave didn’t replace anything and nobody stopped using Gmail or GoogleTalk. Like all tragic heroes, it was just too ambitious.