Google Inc first announced the launch of Google Wave in May last year, and the Google marketing department went to great lengths to promote the real-time online communication platform. The aim of Google Wave was to facilitate online collaborations by combining e-mail communication, instant messaging and social networking. While the application made a substantial splash in the market at first with high user interest and great demand for Google Wave invitations, Google found the user adoption rate disappointing. Yesterday, the search engine giant announced the suspension of development for the Google Wave service.

While Google Wave might be washed up, the company plans to maintain the Wave website until the end of 2010 and look at applying Google Wave technology to future applications. Google CEO Eric Schmidt described Google Wave as “a very clever product”, but went on to say that many users had struggled to find a use for the service on a regular basis. Google executives were upbeat about the announcement, saying they are happy to learn from their failed attempt to corner the social networking market, and hope to adapt the technology to create newer, better applications.

Google is now dealing with the backlash of its latest product. Google Buzz, a social networking service, was launched last week Tuesday, and within only four days it caused a massive outcry amongst users, with most complaints concerned about gaping flaws in the service’s privacy policy.

On Saturday 13 February Google issued a statement on the official Gmail blog, attempting to salvage the search giant’s biggest and most epic fail to date.

Buzz was automatically added onto the Gmail account of every single user. The initial configuration of the product was such that information from Gmail profiles became immediately available to a network of friends created by Google, based on contacts that users most frequently interact with. This network was then visible to a vast audience, widely revealing the personal contact lists of users, with severe repercussions.

With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook are clearly the leaders of social networking amongst the online community. Twitter are in a not-so-close second place with a comparatively small “following” (pun intended) of 18 million users. With this many people subscribing to online social networking, it was only a matter of time before online giant, Google, came to the party in anticipation of getting a nice fat slice of the social networking cake. The secret weapon that they’ve been teasing us about for the last couple of months was revealed yesterday and goes by the name of Google Buzz. The question that everyone is asking after day one is: “Will it stay? Or will it go?” I played around with Google buzz yesterday, chatted to friends (online of course) and did a little bit of research into the general online public’s reaction to Google Buzz. This is what I found: