The news of Google Wave’s demise caught many of us by surprise. The service had been available for only about a year. It had just joined Google Apps.
Google maintained that they had not seen strong adoption. This may be true but it did have a core community that is none too pleased about Google’s decision.
So much so that a group has created “Save Google Wave,” a website dedicated to keeping Google Wave from being shuttered.
The site provides different ways for people to express their support for Google Wave. As of this evening more than 19,400 people have given a “thumbs up,” for saving the service. The Twitter account has 360 followers. More than 250 people have retweeted the site and 70 have given it a Digg.
Oh yes, and you can buy a t-shirt or a button. We’re not sure what that is for except perhaps to give the developers a bit for the work they are doing to raise awareness. It would help if they provided a disclaimer of some sort.
These are not huge numbers. But more illuminating are the emails in support of Google Wave. These include those from a physicist, a student collaborating on a novel with his girlfriend and a software developer.
“I am a technology student and have been working on a fiction novel for past few months. I collaborate with my girlfriend for the story who lives across the world. Google wave gives us a great way to Add, edit, argue, change, disagree and elaborate on the story all at once in real time. I see no other tool can provide that in present date. I love it. It’s a bit ahead of time product for sure, I think it should be worth waiting for people to come up with ways to use it in time. “
Save Google Wave shows the effect that a large company like Google can have. To its credit, Google is releasing much of the technology to the open-source community. Unfortunately, many of the supporters may not be technically oriented to develop a service from open-source components. But perhaps their numbers will be strong enough to make Google at least think a bit more about the impact it has when a service is shuttered.
