Google admits Wave failure

Google has announced that it is ceasing development on Wave, the communication tool it launched in September last year.

The concept behind Wave was to recreate e-mail for the modern age, by bringing in elements such as letting users to see each other typing in real time, and allowing them work on documents together.

However, Google said: “Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked”, and announced it would be ending development on the project – although parts of the code that have been developed are now available as open source.

“We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through to the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects,” it added.

Chief executive Eric Schmidt stayed optimistic about the failed experiment, saying: “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely OK to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that.”

Other Google ‘failures’ include Google Answers, Google Radio, Google Health and Google Notebook, and its next experiment is rumoured to be a social networking site called Google Me, which could provide competition to Facebook.

Google recently announced a 24% increase in net profit for the last quarter.