Google said on Wednesday that it was killing its Wave collaborative development environment, citing lack of interest, according to published reports such as in the Wall Street Journal.

Blog entries from Google appeared as recently as July 27; in fact, the Google Wave blog does not yet have any information about the shutdown, which was announced on the main Google blog.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," wrote Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow. "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."

Google Wave was intended to be a web application for real-time communication and collaboration, Google had described the application. "People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time."

Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked, wrote Clara Cain Miller in the New York Times. Wave also had several competitors, ranging from Salesforce’s Chatter to Jive, she added.