After releasing Google Wave to the public, it looks like the search engine king has finally admitted that its favorite child was unable to capture the hearts of the masses.
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.
But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. (Official Google Blog)
Note: Emphasis mine
While Google Wave itself may have been a public failure, the technology behind it was not, and we will probably see the search engine giant incorporate Google Wave in a four products down the road.
Google Me
Although Google has been rather secretive about their upcoming social network, we will probably see many features ported to Google Me from Google Wave.
What those will be is any ones guess (note: perhaps the collaboration part of Google Wave?), but it would not be surprising to see Google Wave resurrected in the form of Google Me (with large doses of social goodness of course!)
Blogger
The worlds most popular blogging platform may inherit live editing from Google Wave, which would enable blogspot fans to make live public changes to entries posted online.
Google could also use the service in the comment section, where admins would receive “waves” (or notifications) within their Google account regarding new comments, and would be able to reply back without visiting their blogger account.
Google Docs
Perhaps the product that has most to gain from Google Wave’s demise is Google Docs, especially if Google incorporated their brainstorming feature within their favored office suite.
Live annotations upon entries could speed up adoption of the suite amongst CEO’s the corporate world (although employees may not enjoy viewing live comments regarding their work from the boss in real time).
Gmail
Google could easily roll out a “live reply” feature within Gmail, which would show you friends who were “too cool” to turn on Google Talk replying to your message in real time.
While this feature would probably freak out a lot of users, it would propel Google ahead of its rivals, although it wouldn’t be surprising if this was a Gmail only feature (as Microsoft and Yahoo would probably avoid adopting it).
Any more?
There are probably a few other services that would assimilate whatever scraps are left over from Google Wave, especially Google Talk and (to a degree) YouTube.
Despite the fact that Wave was suppose to usher in a new era of technology for the search engine giant, we will probably end up seeing Wave’s remnants across the Googleverse.
This  may help Google later on if they ever work up the courage to relaunch Google wave to the masses (with hopefully a better explanation of its features).
Originally posted on August 5, 2010 @ 9:01 am