As some of you may have heard, Google last week made a surprise decision to stop developing Google Wave at the end of this year. At Next Agenda, we are very disappointed by this news.

Next Agenda was one of the early adopters of Google Wave, and we have already used Wave in some pilot programs that demonstrated the power of this new collaborative tool. Indeed, as Google announced plans to stop development of Wave, we were just about to launch a new Wave-based collaboration for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a George Soros-funded economic think tank, that we have been working closely with since the beginning of this year. 

In light of Google’s decision, we are reevaluating how we might use Google Wave from now on, if at all. I was down at the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View this week talking to our Wave contacts about our options. We had been working with Google for the last year as a partner developer in pushing the capabilities of Wave. 

However, Next Agenda remains committed to collaboration using a variety of online tools to solve big problems. We are currently exploring some exciting new tools that will help us achieve this goal.

For more information about Google’s decision to stop development on Wave, please see their post on the Google Blog. Much of it had to do with a business decision about the tool not reaching the scale of use as quickly as they wanted.  (My understanding is that 1 million people were regularly using Wave, as we were, but apparently those are not the kind of mass numbers that a global company like Google looks for.) As they said in the post: "Despite numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked."

We were one of those loyal fans who did love the tool. We are truly disappointed by Google's decision. Such is life in the early adopter fast lane. 

We will keep you updated as we explore our next steps for online collaboration. Please check back later (we are about to rework and relaunch this website), or sign up for our mailing list to keep abreast of new developments. Thanks. 

Peter Leyden

CEO, Next Agenda