Google Wave was so promising, but it simply did not catch on. That's the bottom line that caused Google to drop Wave. Google announced today via the company's blog that they will no longer continue to develop Google Wave.

Google will leave Wave in its place until at least the end of the year. The code is already open source so someone will surely pick it up and continue, but Google won't develop resources to it.

"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."