You win some, you lose some. Put Google Wave in the latter category. Today Google announced that it was officially pulling the plug on Google Wave, its wiki-like service that was created to offer “real time communication and collaboration” to the masses.

Apparently the masses didn’t want, or at least didn’t grok, “real time communication and collaboration.”

Or maybe they were just worried about privacy.

Actually, our colleagues who do want to communicate and collaborate in real time online are already doing so, but they are doing it using wiki software (such as the dead-easy to install, and free, PM Wiki), which they run on their own servers, thank you very much, thus avoiding the privacy question altogether.

In any event, Google today explained that they were “jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication.”

But, concedes Google, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”

Thus, they conclude, “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

So long, Wave, we hardly knew ye.