Google has waved goodbye to it's real-time collaboration and communication tool Google wave.

We here at WSI are sad to see it go as we had started using it to enable our Internet Marketing consultants to collaborate in real time during our weekly brainstormng sessions. 

Google has blamed a lack of users of the service, which was launched last year. Google were excited about Google Wave internally, although they weren't quite sure how users would take to it.  My initial thoughts are that they "bit off more than they could chew" and had too broad a scope of its usage.

Wave has not seen the adaption they would have liked to have seen according to Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations at Google in a recent blog post.

"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 product was created by the two brothers who created Google Maps Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

 Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was was speaking in Lake Tahoe California said it was hard to understand why the product didn't take off. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

Dan Frommer, a journalist with Business Insider said “By showing it’s smart enough to swallow its pride and get rid of bad ideas, like Wave and the Nexus One store, Google is showing us it's probably smart enough to come up with some really successful ideas, too.”

I think there is a lot of truth in Dan's statemenent.  There are lots of great apps and tools out there produced by Google that most people are not aware of.  It is interesting that even as an Internet Marketing Agency we often stumble upon these tools by accident - and we spend most of our day in Google land!

Lets hope Google keep these apps coming but they might want to market them a little better going forward!