Google To Shutter Knol, Wave, Gears 218
An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect, Google has outlined a plan to close down Wave. The experimental communication medium will go read-only on January 31, and on April 30 they will shut it down completely. Also on April 30, Google will be changing Knol so that individual knols are not viewable, though users will still be able to download and export them until October 1, at which point they'll disappear entirely. Google Gears is also getting the axe, as is Search Timeline and the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative."
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:4, Informative)
At least Google did the right thing with Wave and made it open source:
http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-in-a-box
Still, I'll miss the old girl. At least I have hopes that eventually I'll have a company-wide Wave server to replace Wikis (which have horrible access control) and email (which is just horrible).
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:5, Informative)
You could also run Wave yourself: Google has made it Open Source and it's now an Apache project: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/index.html [apache.org]
Re:Wave (frown) = Sun Microsystems (Score:2, Informative)
If you started a company who's success was dependent on a third party with no contractual obligation giving away something for free, you deserve to fail. For sheer stupidity of not having a backup plan, if nothing else.
Re:life cycle of a cloud (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, but no, OP is correct. Clouds are condensed water droplets: liquid. Gaseous water is invisible.
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:4, Informative)
I agree completely.
We had a production issue one day, and the team was spread all over the country at the time. We decided Wave would be perfect for collaboration. Signing up was easy enough, but every conversation got threaded in weird ways, we couldn't figure out how to tell what had been read or not. It was a total mess. After an hour or so we gave up and just used a chat room.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have worked for us, but we could not figure it out.