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Google is officially ending a couple of their programs. Some of them today, others a bit further down the roadmap. Today for instance is the last time you can go into Google Labs! They announced that it would be closing down a while ago, and today… is that day.
According to the official word from on high. The list of projects going down is as follows.
- Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
- In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it usingGoogle Takeout.
- Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
- Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
- The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.
I Like when companies know enough to shut down things that aren’t working. Its a little Thomas Edison, the 99 things that didn’t work never outweigh the one that does. And I would much rather see a robust devlopement team working on fine tuning Google+ than keeping Buzz afloat.
Here are my reactions in order.
- I honestly forgot Google Code Search existed… which is probably what led to its removal.
- While I liked Buzz, there was too much crap traffic that came through it and the privacy issues killed it long before Google+ evolved. Think windows vista, the name alone has bad mojo but by the end of its run it wasn’t a bad OS.
- Jaiku, could have been huge. But twitter had a better name and wider adoption
- Thank you for getting social out of things they didn’t need to be in.
- never used it, don’t even know what it is
Out of everything goign away I love Google Labs. you could always find a neat project or feature to add onto igoogle, or gmail. Multiple Stars and inboxes saved my bacon for a while. There seemed to be a market for fun quirky projects. I wonder where it will go now?
So what Say you? Is there anything facing the firing squad you loved and will miss? Or are these also ran products that never hit your field of vision?