Google plans to shut down Wave

Only a little over a year ago, Google launched its Wave feature amid declarations that it would revolutionize the way groups of people could collaborate on documents. The company even suggested that Wave could replace e-mail.

But the Wave has crashed — Google said Wednesday that it had halted development of the feature. The Mountain View, Calif., company said it would keep the service online only until about the end of the year.

The feature let users send digital correspondence, called waves, that could be edited by anyone in a designated group on the fly. But that took a heavy toll on Google’s servers.

To manage growth, the company required potential users to get an invitation from someone already using Wave. The invites proved to be so popular that they were selling for $50 on EBay.

But when users finally got on the service, they generally found that only a few of their acquaintances also had access. That limited the utility as a collaborative tool.

Wave was also plagued by technical problems, and some users complained that its complicated interface was confusing.

mark.milian@latimes.com