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Internet giant Google unveiled it’s networking tool Google Wave at it’s annual developer conference last year to much anticipation, but less than a year down the line they have decided to cease developing the real-time communication tool.

Google acknowledged that despite the original hype over the possibilities offered by Wave; when it was launched, users didn’t display the same levels of excitement.

“Google Wave set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser,” blogged Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations at Google.

“We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop – even “playback” the history of changes.

“We were jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication,” he admitted.

“But despite numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product.”

He went on to say that Google would continue to provide support for the product until at least the end of this year, but after that users will have to ‘wave goodbye’.

“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” wrote Urs Hölzle. “We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, released a statement regarding the wave announcement. “Our policy is, we try things, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

If you haven't heard of Google Wave or had the chance to experience it check out the following video from Google -