Google Wave launched last year as a live, real-time, web application with which people could communicate and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, etc. But Google has decided to end the Wave experiment

According to Urs Hülzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, "When we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even 'playback' the history of changes — all within a browser...But 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. 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."