This is a pretty huge disappointment: Google’s admitted defeat on Wave, citing poor uptake, and plans to cut it loose later this year.
“despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, 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.”
— Urs Hölzle on the Official Google Blog [link to post]
I’ve found Google Wave to be very useful as a meeting and collaboration space for working with people hundreds or thousands of miles away from me, but I guess not enough people saw just how useful it actually is. It does have a pretty steep learning curve initially, so I can see why a lot of people probably didn’t bother, or didn’t get what it was for. I guess it’s back to IRC, IMs and Campfire for now.