Google officially kills off Wave

Internet powerhouse Google has launched a couple of projects in the past, and apart from Google+, most of them haven’t really worked out, one of them being Google Wave.

Google Wave allowed users to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking, but stopped developing the site as a separate product over a year ago. Now Google has announced specific dates for when they will no longer offer the service, and kill it completely

“We committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012,” Google said in a statement.

Google urged users to export all their data before the service goes down, but users will be able “continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature”.

However, the company also provided an alternative. “If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012,” Google concluded.

Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor