Google is halting development on Wave, its web app for real-time communication.

“We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product,” Google Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Hölzle said on the official Google Blog Wednesday.

The company cites slow user adoption as the reason for its decision. Google will continue to support Wave through the end of the year, at which point the product will be phased out.

Wave debuted in May, 2009 at Google I/O, the company’s yearly developer conference. Developers were excited about Wave — it incorporated several new technologies that simultaneously pushed the boundaries of what was possible in browser-based apps, and tapped into the craze of real-time communication fueled by Twitter and Facebook. You typed something into a Wave, and your collaborators at the other end of the line saw what you were typing almost immediately. Everything was built in JavaScript and HTML5. We were intrigued by its possibilities, and we even proclaimed that Wave could one day replace the e-mail inbox as our primary form of communication.

Courtesy by webmonkey.com

In the weeks after Wave’s debut, invitations to the beta test were scarce, and the unlucky souls stuck on the outside were clamoring to get in.

But once they started using Wave, most people were confused about how it fit into their lives. Sure, Wave let you collaborate with several people at once on documents, share photos with multiple recipients, and it created a searchable, editable stream of pure information. But there are already a raft of tools to do these things — it’s easy enough to use Google Docs to collaborate on documents, there are plenty of photo sharing services users are already invested in, and the search and chat tools inside Gmail are well above par. Wave just seemed a bit too crowded with information — it was e-mail, chat, media sharing and document editing all rolled into one (admittedly busy) interface — and the fucntionality too redundant.

Courtesy by webmonkey.com