Google Waves kills off seven services to outdated and unpopular services

Google discontinuing seven services are up for the chop, including Google Wave and Google Knol, Google Wave combined instant messaging and email and was designed to allow multiple users to collaborate on projects in real time, a chat-email hybrid introduced in 2009 that was supposed to revolutionize online communications, but never really caught on.
Google Wave failed to become popular, and there are many blogs speculating as to why: its complexity is cited as one of the main reasons. A number of theories have been proposed as to why Google Wave, like so many of the company’s products outside of search (cough cough, Google Buzz) didn’t work out.

You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. I think it could have worked had Google Wave simply had a primarily horizontal orientation, with responses to earlier waves appearing vertically below the original wave.

The other services to shut down are:

• These include Google Bookmarks List, which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends, and Google Friends Connect, an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends.

• Google Friend Connect: The service will end for non-blogger sites on March 1 next year;

• Google Gears, the much-hyped software that aimed to achieve web browser functions while offline, is also being discontinued. Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers on December 1.

• Google Search Timeline: The final service being axed is Google Search Timeline, which allowed users to view a graph of historical query results, a graph of historical results for a query.

• Knol: Google Knol, a Wikipedia-style service aimed at improving web content. an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.

• Research projects are also for the chop, including Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (or RE