For those users, we first and foremost salute your dedication. As Google Wave enters its last day of existence, let’s look back on its birth and its more interesting features. We’ll also look at how you can move your existing Wave conversations off of Google and into the new Wave – Apache Wave.

Google released Wave to quite a bit of excitement in 2009. Just like Google+, the initial launch of the product was an invitation only affair. Unlike Google+ though, people were desperate for an invitation because this was the first big push from Google for something unique in the social networking world.

Even though Google did everything they could to save Wave and even opened the service to the general public in 2010, it wasn’t enough to save the service. Google announced that the Google Wave development was ending due to a lack of interest.

Google shutting down Wave development wasn’t the end of the project though. A lot of people saw the untapped potential in Wave and began to build on its open source foundations. It’s now called Apache Wave after Google gave the application to the Apache Foundation. While it’s currently in incubation, interested developers can contribute to the Google Wave Protocol project here.

That all leads up to today, the announced date for the death of Google’s version of Wave. The application has been sitting around on its death bed for two years, but Google is now content to let it go. You have until the end of the day to get your stuff off of the service using the .pdf export feature.

Even though Google Wave never took off, it has influenced other technologies including the extremely useful real time collaboration feature found in Google Docs. The collaboration feature from Wave can also be found in the recently released Google Drive apps. So don’t think of Google Wave as dying, it’s just returning to the lifestream of Google to empower other products and applications.

Were you a fan of Google Wave? Even though it’s been on death row for two years now, are you still going to miss it? Let us know in the comments.

Google announced that it will expand upon the 200,000 lines of code that it has open sourced already, to "flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete applicatino or ‘Wave in a Box’".

The project will include:

• an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• refinements to the client-server protocols
• gadget, robot and data API support
• support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

Google stresses that the project won’t have full Google Wave functionality, but it will give developers and users a way to run Wave servers and host waves on their own hardware. This should please some IT departments.

It still remains to be seen what other Google products Wave technology will appear in.

"Some of you have asked what we mean by preview," says Google. "This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we’ve focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky."

The company also says there are some key features that have yet to be fully implemented, such as removal of participants from waves, defining groups of users, and permissions configuration. These things will be rolled out in the coming months.

According to Google, over 27,000 developers have been prototyping with the Google Wave APIs since Google I/O where it was introduced. "Amazingly, these developers persevered, found work arounds, and advocated for new features when our APIs didn’t do what they needed," says Google Wave Product Manager Stephanie Hannon.

Google is featuring a few extensions that are ready to use today. These include extensions for Sudoku puzzles, telephone conferencing, real-time video chat, maps, and weather forecasts.

Google tells sandbox developers that they will get Wave accounts tomorrow at wave.google.com. They will get instructions for logging in from their sandbox accounts. They will also get invitations to bring on people they want to "wave" with. Below are some prototypes of extensions from SAP, Salesforce, and MediaWikiWave: