The Rizzoma team. (Photo: Rizzoma)

Remember Google Wave, the collaborative workspace tool pushed by Google a few years back that (like most of the search behemoth's social products) never really got traction? By the last death knell of Wave, Google was so over it that the email they sent out announcing that it would be shut down even misspelled the name of the product as "Google Wage." Yikes.

Despite Wave's lack of appeal as a commercial product, it did have some enthusiastic fans. It was one of those things where you either detested it or wouldn't shut up about it. Admittedly, this reporter forced her entire blog staff in college to employ Wave as a productivity tool, much to the chagrin of the majority of staffers who oddly preferred frenzied Gchat messages and group emails. But it seems like we aren't alone in our passion for Wave--in fact, our love for the product is small potatoes compared to the team at Rizzoma, who were literally so depressed by Wave's closure that they moved to the Ukraine for two months to build an alternative.

"Our team loved the Wave. We've used it in our business and just for fun conversations. There was no way we could go back to email," wrote Rizzoma UX visioner Daniil Kravtsov in an email to Betabeat. "When Google decided to shut the project down we had only one true way — to resurrect the great idea and continue its development."

Hardcore.

From mid-July to September 2011, the Rizzoma team worked, lived and hacked from Odessa, Ukraine on an online collaboration tool that could mirror the functionality of the Google product they missed so much. The result is a stylized real-time collaboration platform that offers many of the same features that Wave did, including real-time editing, polls and full-text search.

Mr. Kravtsov told us that Rizzoma has 3,000 active users and counting. "Will the earthlings treasure the [Wave] idea this time?" he asked. We're not sure, but a Wave clone seemed too amusing to ignore.

An email sent from "Google Wage." (twitter.com/alexcornell)

If you got an email in your inbox today from the Google Wage team, it's not an announcement about a new paycheck tracking tool from the 'Plex. Nor is it a social bet-placing arena, where you can play poker with your friends. Actually, it's just a PR faux pas: Google misspelled the name of its own product.

In an email sent to users about the shuttering of Google Wave, the sender name was spelled "Google Wage," an obvious misspelling of "Google Wave." Perhaps Google's PR team was so busy pretending old search features are new that they forgot how to spell.

As with most embarrassing events, Twitter users didn't miss a beat: Soon, a hashtag was born.

"Love it when a billion dollar company can't spell their own product name," tweeted designer Alex Cornell, along with a screenshot of the offending email.

Some users saw opportunity in Google's mistake. "Dear @google, If you hire me, I promise to never misspell your product names. I'm great at proofing," said Christine, who goes by @thechristinecg.

It's fair to note that the "V" and "G" keys are adjacent on the keyboard, and everyone makes typos now and then. But perhaps hiring another proofreader isn't such a bad idea afterall.

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team