Google has announced that it will no longer be developing the Google Wave platform and they’ll at least maintain the site through the end of the year. Google stands by the product and says they learned a lot from it but puts it nicely when they say it “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”
I think part of the problem has been that Google Wave was buggy and most users were turned off by that fact. Some things, like watching another person type or edit your typos live, was interesting but the overall experience was that the platform wasn’t stable enough for full use. You couldn’t stop using e-mail for it, you wouldn’t stop using IM for it, it was only mediocre in everything it did.
Personally, I hope Google learns a bit about how the rolled out limited invite system can also detrimentally affect a system. People were vying for Google Wave invites, purchasing them off of eBay, and annoying their friends about it. Within 2 weeks, however, few even spoke of Google Wave. And so it fades, with this announcement from Google of its demise being the last thing I heard about Google Wave in months.