Google is killing Wave, the communication and collaboration tool it launched last year, after not seeing the sort of uptake it had hoped for.

The service, which blended email, instant messaging and social networking features into one user interface, was touted by Google at its launch last May as an innovative reinvention of online communications.

On Wednesday, the company said in a blog post it would no longer continue developing Wave. It will maintain its website until at least the end of this year.

The technology behind the service, meanwhile, will be rolled into other projects, the company said.

Wave was launched last year by invitation only, but once users got onto the service, many found it confusing and couldn't find a use for it.

Technology reviewers savaged it: "Wave turned out to be an over-hyped disappointment for the first generation of users," Linux Magazine reported last year.

"Wave users have a surfeit of invites and no one interested in joining the party. The bouncers can go home and take the velvet ropes with them — few people are interested in crashing that party now."

Google's senior vice-president of operations, Urs Hoelzle, acknowledged that the company didn't know how Wave would be accepted before it was rolled out.

"We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication," he wrote in the blog post.

"Wave has taught us a lot and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web."

Hoelzle also said that Google is working on tools that will allow Wave users to "liberate" any information they've put onto the service.

Wave is the second high-profile offering shut down by Google in recent months.

The first was its Nexus One smartphone, which it hyped as a "superphone" at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Google hoped to change phone buying habits in North America by selling the unlocked device directly to consumers via its website, but pulled the plug on the endeavour in May.

Technology analysts were not surprised by the Wave news on Thursday, pointing out that with the sheer number of features and services Google launches, some are bound to fail.