Google announced last week it is to drop its collaborative communication tool Google Wave.

Launched last year at the Google I/O conference, the tool aimed to combine features from email and chat with multimedia content to make sharing and real-time collaborating easier.

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked”, the search engine giant said in a company statement.

The development of Wave will no longer be continued but the tool will be maintained until the end of the year.

The move has sparked Wave fans to set up a protest site to persuade Google to change its mind. Despite the large-scale failure, Wave has managed to build up a small but loyal following.

The savegooglewave website appeals to keep the Wave alive:

“When we heard the news about Google Wave being shut down, we were devastated. Google Wave is an invaluable tool that we use every day to keep track and collaborate on projects (in real-time). Please help us to keep it alive and spread the word.”

The protest site has so far created over 32,000 likes and 1,142 tweets.

Source: Stuff.co.nz