What is Google Wave?
Google Wave was an online collaboration and communication platform developed by Google and launched in 2009. It was designed to bring together the functionality of email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking into a single integrated tool to enable real-time collaboration and communication.
Some of the key features of Google Wave included:
- Real-time communication - messages appeared instantly as users typed them
- Wiki functionality - documents could be jointly edited by many users simultaneously
- Threads - conversations and documents were contained within topics known as waves
- Extensions - developers could build extensions that customize functionality
Google Wave was an ambitious project aiming to reinvent online communication and collaboration. However, despite interest from early adopters, it failed to see significant user adoption. There were concerns about the complexity of the user interface and confusion around when to use Wave vs other tools like email or IM.
In August 2010, just a year after its public launch, Google announced that it would be ending the Google Wave development project, citing lack of user adoption. While certain features lived on in other Google products, Google Wave as an independent platform was shut down.