Google schedules Wave's funeral

Google's arguably awkward social product Wave has had its death date set in stone by the web giant.

Waving goodbye.
(Credit: Google)

Google wrote on the Wave blog yesterday that users have until 31 April 2012 to get their information out of Wave before the company shuts it down for good.

Google Wave is also set to go read-only at the end of January next year, meaning that users won't be able to post new waves to the service. The announcement of the official end of Wave sees Google fulfil its promise to maintain the poorly received social network until the end of 2010.

Google is now encouraging users to export their data from Wave to ensure that it isn't lost to the ages.

"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," said David Wang, software engineer on the Google Wave product team."

Wang highlighted that there are other ways for die-hard followers to continue using the Google Wave product, including an open-sourced version of the project called Apache Wave.

Google decided to kill the Australian-developed Wave product last year, following poor take up, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the service.