Google Deep-Sixes Wave

So much for that “20 percent time” idea.

Google has decided to discontinue development of Google Wave, its new online collaboration tool. Why? Says Google, “It has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”

“We will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects,” the company said in its blog post. “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.”

Wave’s low adoption rate isn’t surprising; in fact, you could argue the product was always a non-starter. Overhyped and overcomplex, Wave was not so much “a “modern version of email” as it was a chaos of real-time communication, sucking IMs, status updates, messages and media into a brutal digital shore dump that wasn’t really sequentially readable.

And in the end it didn’t redefine messaging or real-time collaboration, though it did do some wonderful things for “Pulp Fiction”…