Last week, Google announced that it is going to shut down its relatively new web-application that was designed to substitute all online communication services. It was first announced in May, 2009, and a year later Wave was opened for free user registration all over the world. The ultimate goal was to merge e-mail, instant messaging, Wikipedia and social networking in one web-product. Still, the attempt failed.

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we [Google] would have liked,” said commented Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow in his post on the Google Blog on August 4. “Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

Goggle is planning to close the service in December, and it leaves the central parts of the code available as open source, enabling web developers to use them for their future projects. They will also help users ‘extricate’ the data, which is now stored in the service. The Google team may also use some of the Wave development as the ground for the upcoming projects. The announcement caused uproar among internet users—some of them believe that the service is very handy and even created the Save The Wave movement to make Google change its mind. Still, the decision is already taken.

“It’s a very clever product and we liked what it could do,” he said. “We try things and remember we celebrate our failures. We’ve always believed that our products would be better with more social signals. We’re not trying to do what Facebook does. It needs technologies around friends and relationships to be provided to everything,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.