Google is constantly developing new products and ideas that it hopes will grab many users. Some of the projects that Google develops sound cool, but ultimately don't see wide adoption. Such is the case with Google Wave.

Google announced that it is not going to continue the development of Wave as a standalone product. The reason Google cites for the end of the Wave project is lower than expected adoption of the service. Wave was supposed to be a real-time collaboration environment where business users and others could work on documents and other content at the same time. 

Users were able to see the typing of other people in real time and the Wave system had tie-ins for third-party developers to offer gadgets and other software to work along with Wave. Google says that developers were very excited about Wave when it was announced.

A post on the Official Google Blog reads, "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."

Google is working on tools that will allow those that did use Wave to get their content off the platform so it can continue to be used. Google also stated that many of the cooler features of Wave like the drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing features are already available as open source software.

Google had expected to bring Wave to business this year along with Google Voice. The beta for Wave launched in September of 2009.