Google sets Wave shutdown date, points to open source projects
Google has now set specific dates for the shutdown of Google Wave, the collaboration service it launched in May 2009 and officially abandoned in August 2010. It has been informing users by email that from 31 January 2012, it will mark all waves, the equivalent of a conversation or thread on the service, as read only. On 30 April 2012, the service will be turned off entirely. Google is directing users who are interested in continuing to work with Wave or a similar collaborative tools to look at open source projects.
The company points to the Apache Wave project, currently in the Apache incubator where it is gathering its resources and building a development and governance model which can be fully endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation. Another project, Walkaround, is an open source implementation of the Apache Wave code which runs on Google's App Engine. Walkaround has an experimental feature which allows waves from Google Wave to be directly imported into Walkaround, albeit one at a time, without history or attachments. This functionality will be available until the 30 April shutdown of Google Wave, as will Wave's own PDF export capability.
(djwm)
