More than a year ago we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time we committed to maintaining the site at least through the end of 2010. Today we’re sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. So we'd encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your Waves from Google. This feature will work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Posted by the Google Wave Team

In August, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. Today, I am happy announce the launch of Google Shared Spaces in Google Labs as one of those off-shoots.

A bunch of us who had been working on the Wave APIs were brainstorming about what it would take to just run a Wave gadget. Developers had been doing wonderful stuff --building real-time mini applications--and rather than let that effort go to waste, we wanted to create a new way for people to continue to use these tools and games. Google Shared Spaces is exactly that. A shared space turns a (Wave) gadget into a standalone collaborative application. Just click on the gadget you're interested in to start a new shared space, and then simply send the URL around to share it with your friends and colleagues. You don't need to sign up for a new service - if you have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account, you're good to go.



Each shared space comes with a chat area (which is just another Wave gadget) for extra interaction. So take Shared Spaces for a spin: Use the Waffle gadget to pick the date for a night out with your friends, annotate a shared map with your favorite places and vote on where to go using any of the polling gadgets. Or if you'd rather stay in, hit the games section and challenge somebody for a good old game of chess. To learn more, check out the quick presentation on our about page.

It's still early, but give it a try and send us feedback through our discussion group.

Posted by Douwe Osinga, Software Engineer, Google Shared Spaces Team

As we announced back in August, we are not continuing active development of Google Wave as a stand-alone product, but have been working hard on the open source Wave in a box project and on making waves accessible through Google Docs.

We wanted to let you know that we will keep wave.google.com running past December 31, 2010 until a suitable replacement to host all your waves is available. In the meantime, you can now use the new export feature to download a zipped version of up to ten waves at a time. Learn more in the Google Wave Help Center.

Additionally, Wave in a Box, the project to make it easy for anyone to host their own wave server, has made significant progress on both functionality and community growth. Just last week, the Apache Software Foundation accepted Wave into its incubator for new projects.

Thanks yet again to all our users for giving Wave a try with your schools, businesses and organizations and to the developers who are working on the next steps for the open source project!

Wave on,

Posted by David Wang, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team

We recently made it possible to export a single wave as a Zip file. Now, you can now also select up to 10 waves in your search panel and download them all together as a set of PDFs.



We hope this feature proves a useful way of saving the information that you have in waves. For more information on it, please visit the help center article.

In addition, we're working on ways for you to access waves through Google Docs and as we announced back in August, we'll continue to keep wave.google.com running at least through the end of the year.

Happy exporting!

Posted by Pat Coleman, Google Wave Team

We're dedicated to giving you better access to the information you currently have in Google's Wave servers. We aim to provide multiple ways to let you export and migrate that information, and we have some updates for you in this blog post.

Today, we're announcing a feature that lets you download your Google Wave content as a Zip file. Within any wave, you can now select "Export" which will let you save your current view of the wave, plus any attachments that have been added along the way. We hope this feature proves a useful way of sharing the information that you have in waves. For more information on it, please visit this help center article.

This feature is useful if you have a few waves that you want to export. We are aiming to have a export method for those that have a lot of waves, and will let you know when that's available.

As we announced back in August, we'll continue to keep wave.google.com running at least through the end of the year. In addition, we're working on ways for you to access waves through Google Docs and we hope to share more on our progress soon.

Lastly, if you are interested in developing on the Wave codebase or running your own Wave server to host your waves, check out our developer blog post about the Wave in a Box project.

Posted by Pat Coleman, Google Wave team

Today we posted an update about our plans for Wave open source code and the federation protocol on our Google Wave Developer blog. The post includes a description of our planned code contributions over the coming months as well as resources for developers to follow the progress of the project and stay involved.

Wave on!

Posted by Soren Lassen, Google Wave Team

Some of you may have seen a post on the official Google blog several weeks ago about some changes to the Wave project, and we wanted to let you know that since then we've been hard at work figuring out all the details of the next steps. We're looking at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products, open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers.

While we're still working on plans, we do want to specifically call out that:

• Wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year
• There will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year

Thank you for your outpouring of support and kind comments. We're grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us. We look forward to sharing more information with you in the coming weeks.

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave team