It’s time to say goodbye to Google Wave. The experimental project from Google was fun while it lasted, but didn’t show enough adoption for Google to keep it going. I know many of you will be saddened by the news; real-time trends have been popping up everywhere, from search to microblogging–but the uptake has not made its way to collaboration.

From the Google blog,

“…despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, 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.

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.”

Was Google Wave head of its time? Perhaps. But as much as I’d hoped it would be a revolutionary collaboration tool, I found its navigation less than intuitive (especially compared to other Google projects designed around simplicity), and ultimately involving too much cross-app interactions for mainstream use. The hopes for a centralized collaboration tool were great in theory, but difficult to implement in the setting (and time) provided.

Collaboration is always tricky, especially as it needs to find a way to be customizable, usable and easy to organize for a broad range of users. In many ways, Google has a leg-up in this department, able to tap into several of its other apps, tools and services. This also acts as a downfall, as too much overlap can be confusing and unnecessary at times. But that’s just my two cents.

I still hate to see Wave’s demise, but as you can see by Google’s statement, the technology isn’t going to disappear all together. Our own Mark Hopkins mentioned a handful of projects, inside and outside of Google, that are still working towards real-time collaboration tools, including Activitystrea.ms and Salmon. Google Buzz, too, has been one way in which the search engine has carried over real-time concepts to be applied to some of its other Apps.

With Google still offering open-source code from Wave, it’s now up to the developer community to find something that sticks. And as real-time trends introduce more data sets and exchange networks to play with, the future of real-time collaboration will only become more usable for consumers.