Edudemic

Topics: buzz, google, social networking, wave

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So much for incorporating Google Wave into the classroom. In fact, you won’t really be able to use it anywhere. Google has just announced that they are abandoning the project but will leave the code available for open source projects.

While not really a surprise, it is sad. Google Wave was one of those ‘it’s strange but might actually be useful’ platforms that places like innovative classrooms might have actually found a use for. Instead, Google is pulling the plug because, well, no one really used it or understood it.

Wave was one of the most talked-about products of 2009. Boasting real-time communication and other bells and whistles, it stood to be a platform that many people could build off of. Instead, the rollout was confusing, beta testers said it had no real purpose, and Google never really put its advertising muscle behind it.

With this paragraph, Google ended the eventful life of Wave:

… 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. 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. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

While this is a sad day for Google Wave and the developers behind it, perhaps it is the signal of (yet another) new social networking product coming out of Google. I’m guessing there will be a lot of Google Buzz features incorporated into the new Google OS that’s due out in Q4 of this year.

There were some uses for Wave, such as the group of educators working to craft a social media policy in real-time on Wave. Might be time to move that document over to Google Docs now.