Our inbox recently got hit with a couple sad reminders of how services can roar onto the scene and then whimper away with far less fanfare over time. Such was the case for Google Wave, which is being turned off on April 30, and the fate of Posterous remains a big question mark.
Google sent out an email on Tuesday to remind users of its Google Wave service that its sun is going down on April 30, 2012 (or is that the final Wave is washing ashore?). The move should come as no surprise, as the search giant served notice to its social experiment back in November, and Wave has been stuck in read-only mode.
“More than a year ago we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product,” the email reads. “Back in November 2011, we shared the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. Google Wave is now in read-only mode. This is reminder that 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. We 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,” the text continues. “There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.”
We’ve not quite sure who’s still lamenting the loss of Google Wave, given that it was mostly a ghost town after being released on May 19, 2010 -- and then pronounced dead on arrival less than 14 months later.
Speaking of “pronounced dead,” the kindly folks at Posterous were also in an emailing mood this morning, sending word to their users about the recent acquisition of the company by Twitter, which we reported last Tuesday. Nothing new here -- the email is basically a recap of the company’s blog post of a week ago -- but it still doesn’t look good for the microblogging service, who promises to “share clear instructions” for moving your Posterous blog to another service “in the coming weeks.”
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