Google Wave was one of Google's most high-profile new services. Now it is one of its most high-profile flops.
On Wednesday, Google said that it will stop developing Wave as a standalone product and that the Web site could be shuttered by the end of the year. The technology will remain available if people want to develop new tools with it.
Despite having "numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations at Google, wrote in a company blog post.
Wave, which was introduced to much hype at a conference for Google software developers in 2009, was conceived of as a collaboration tool housed in a Web browser. People could use the application to chat, edit documents, videos and photos and play games together.
But Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked. Wave also has several competitors, ranging from Salesforce's Chatter to Jive.
One of Wave's key ideas -- that the browser is replacing the desktop computer as the center of people's computing lives -- lives on at Google and is the central tenet of its Web-based Chrome operating system.
Wave was also about interacting with people online, which continues to interest Google as well, as it ventures into social networking, most recently with its acquisition of Slide, the social apps maker.