TechFleece

Google have just officially announced that Google Wave will officially end on April 30th 2012. Google Wave will continue as normal until January 31st 2012 where it will become read-only. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off.

Here is the exact wording regarding this via Google:

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Wave account.

If you wish to use the currently experimental Walkaround Import feature to import your previous Waves to Walkaround, then you should know that it has it’s limitations at the moment, but being that this is an Open Source project, I expect these limitations will be lifted soon.

Here is a list of the current limitations for Importing your Waves via the Open Source Walkaround project:

Importing from wave.google.com

Walkaround has an experimental feature to import waves from wave.google.com. You can try it out by pointing your browser at /import on your walkaround server. We suggest that you don’t rely on it yet, since it’s still in a very rough shape.

It currently has the following limitations:

• imports only individual waves rather than everything at once
• private replies are imported as separate waves
• history is not imported
• waves will appear unread
• folder information is lost
• attachments are not imported
• importing very large waves will fail
• since groups and public waves are not supported, the importer will not have access to the wave they imported if they are not an explicit participant
• Walkaround does not have support for read-only participants, so all participants will be able to modify imported waves

It’s a shame when a product dies that you have used in the past, but Google Wave’s initial foray into the world of social networking was lacking more than a few certain things hence it really never took off. They have since completely turned that around by bringing out Google+ which isn’t a Facebook killer (Google never actually said it was) but is hands down one of the best Google products out there and it interacts with a lot of the Google products and is continuing to develop on a daily basis. If you aren’t on Google+ yet, then you should check it out as it’s a fantastic service and doesn’t have any of the crap that you get on Facebook. Photographers especially love it.

Richard