Google has announced that it is killing off Google Wave, its communication and sharing application.

As with most ventures on the internet, they can start quickly and die quickly.

Wave “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” said  Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of operations. Google won’t continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but it will maintain the site at least through the end of the year so people can continue developing Wave apps. It will also use the technology in other Google projects, he said.

It many ways this is becoming the norm for large scale internet development.  If it is not huge, fast, then the plug gets pulled.  Which in many ways, is shame.  At Scoosh we liked it.

The Future and Google

Google has been trying to gain a foothold in the Social Media market and has admitted that both Twitter and Facebook, have offerings that they have tried to both emulate and compete with.  They have also been surprised that they did not predict both their successes.  But whether you are an internet giant or a small business, predicting customers and market behaviour is still difficult.

With Google Me and Google Games still being developed, maybe the question to ask is how many attempts Google will make at competing, before it decides to buy the competition instead.