05 August 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor

Google Waves goodbye to its real-time communication app

Google releases new products and attempts to revamp the internet quite regularly, and is mostly remembered for its triumphs - its core search engine itself revolutionised the way we search, after all. However, today sees the search seraph admitting it made a false start when it came to Google Wave.

Announcing that the Mountain View company would discontinue support for the service, which was touted as a dramatic new way of real-time communication online, CEO Eric Schmidt chalked the failure up to Google's tendency for pushing the envelope with new technologies.

"Our policy is we try things," Schmidt told a crowd at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, California.

"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."

In its lifespan - just over a year - too few people adopted and implemented the service, leading to its demise.

"Despite ... numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," said the company's senior vice president of operations, Urs Hölzle, in an official Google 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."

Schmidt maintained that the company does not like to press too hard when releasing programmes and applications, as the market generally dictates what kind of technologies are needed.

"As a culture we don't over-promote products," he told the conference. "We tend to sort of release them and then see what happens."

The Google captain praised Buzz, however - often derided as one of the company's lesser offerings - as a success, noting that it has millions of users.

However, he conceded the service is now "really an extension of Gmail."

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