thearchivist.funGoogle Wave goes read-only, then dark
Google's support page on the status of Google Wave sets out two steps. From 31 January 2012 Wave became read-only: users could not create or edit waves, robots that wrote to waves stopped working, and reading existing waves still worked. On 30 April 2012 all Wave servers were shut down and users lost access to their waves. The page advised exporting any waves worth keeping before that date, and said they could be exported with the existing PDF export during the read-only stage. It mentions a third-party open source project, Walkaround, with an experimental feature for importing waves from Google. Wave was built for live, collaborative documents that changed in front of their participants. A PDF is a still picture of that. The export preserved the words at one moment but not the editing, the playback or the robots that had acted on them.
Context and provenance
This record rests on Google's own support page, which is an authoritative statement of the plan but does not describe what any user actually exported. It also says nothing about why Google ended the product, so no reason is claimed here.
A wave exported to PDF should be described as a snapshot, with the export date, and not as the wave itself.
Quote the two dates exactly as Google's page gives them and describe any exported PDF as a snapshot made on its own date. If you rely on the Walkaround importer, treat it as a third-party experiment, as the page does, and test it on a sample before drawing conclusions about the content it recovers.
Transmission timeline
- 2012-01-31
Wave becomes read-only.
- 2012-04-30
Wave servers shut down.
Why it matters
A collaborative, live format was retired with an export that could only capture a static picture of it.
What remains uncertain
Earlier stages of Wave's history (such as the decision to end development) were not read for this record and are not claimed.
Sources and evidence
- Google Support: Status of Google Wave
Read-only from 31 January 2012, shutdown on 30 April 2012, PDF export, mention of the Walkaround project.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.