Search giant Google has suffered several high-profile local departures, with both its first Australian employee and current local head of YouTube Kate Vale and Google Maps and Wave co-founder Lars Rasmussen signalling they had left the company.

Google Wave, the social networking service canceled by Google, will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, a Google engineer said this week.

Google has pulled the plug on Google Wave. The communication and collaboration tool promised to revolutionize communication--with Google arrogantly asserting that Wave would supersede e-mail the same way the computer made the typewriter obsolete once upon a time. Unfortunately, nobody really understood what to do with Wave, and Google never gave any useful guidance to clarify it.

A little more than a year after the service was launched, Google is pulling the plug on its Google Wave social-networking service, the company said Wednesday.

Google may be getting ready to launch its fabled Google TV set-top box during the company's Google I/O developer conference on Thursday, according to the latest rumors. The search giant may also make an Android announcement, possibly introducing Android 2.2, the next iteration of Google's smartphone OS.

Google may hope that the widespread release of Google Wave serves as a new entry into the enterprise, but some analysts don't expect that businesses will rush to adopt it.

Google will make its Wave collaboration and communication tool available to anyone who wants to try it out on Wednesday at its I/O developer conference.

In order to boost its Wave product, Google has acquired AppJet, which makes the EtherPad real-time workgroup collaboration application.

"Google Wave [is] a highly interactive communication environment," intones the official Wave Extension Design Principles document. "As such, it provides both rewards and challenges to programmers wishing to extend its functionality."