It seems we must live without one of the hottest new tools promised by the mighty Google.

Little more than a year after announcing its arrival to an eager audience of developers, Google has decided not to go ahead with Google Wave.

This combination of instant messaging, e-mail and file sharing has apparently not seen the popular adoption which was hoped for. Although it remains in operation, Google will not develop it further and it is expected to fade away in due course.

Had it prospered, Google Wave may have changed the way we work and communicate online, allowing users to drop in and out of conversations much like mingling at a party. It would also have allowed ‘real time’ communication, with character by character live typing visible to all. Collaboration on projects may have been far easier; users could drag and drop files from the Desktop into a discussion for example.

Perhaps the growth in popularity of Twitter has taken some of the attraction out of the ‘instant’ aspect. Perhaps it was just too complicated a concept for the average user. But the principles seem sound, so we’ll have to wait and see how they are addressed - by the next wave of development perhaps.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html