But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

From the official Google blog.

I for one am a huge Google Wave fan and hate to see this go. Why Google? Why!?

Read more about Google’s Chrome Frame

Thanks Google!

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

Google Blog

Download the latest via SVN or visit the project page: Winn Guestbook Project

1. Put Them to Use
Just because a server is old doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. A server that was too old to be used on their main infrastructure could be used for various other tasks, such as testing projects under development or running various applications needed for the use of employees and internal resources. I think this is a very plausible situation because servers are so expensive and costly to move. Not all applications require powerful servers and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that by the time Google was done with a server, it was still fairly new.

2. Grave Scenario
Considering there is a Google search engine for almost every country in the world and in every time zone, someone is always searching on Google. My guess is their servers never, ever get a break. With the amount of servers Google needs, they must have their servers setup so that each one is always working at full capacity and server power is never wasted. For example, if a server wasn’t handling massive United States search traffic during the day, it could be processing data for search engine rankings, updating databases, or maybe even handling searches from people in other countries at night.

With this kind of abuse, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me Google’s servers had a short life span. In most environments, servers almost always get a break. For instance, a server in a corporate environment would be busy all day but after everyone left for the day, quiet all night. Without this kind of break, a server’s life span is more than likely decreased greatly.

3. Give Back to the Tech World
Who is to say Google is mean and greedy with its processing power? From this blog written in 2004 we can find out that Google is donating some of its old servers to Wikipedia. This page at Wikimedia, however, suggests the opposite, when it talks about Google hosting Wikimedia and says:

“Google is eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board wants to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully.”

Clearly, this means there is money involved here, not free servers! So, who really knows what Google does with their old servers? Maybe it’s just one of life’s little secrets we’ll never know…