14 DAY TRIAL // Google is not done with killing off unneeded products. With new CEO Larry Page in charge, Google has started focusing on the big products that make the most difference. A lot of side projects, experimental ones, ones that not many people use have been shut down or merged into existing products.
Google spends resources on these products, meaning people, which could be spent for better gain elsewhere.
Now it's at it again and has announced that it will shut down Buzz, a notable move but hardly an unexpected one, but also smaller projects such as Jaiku, Code Search and social features in iGoogle.
"In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+," Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product now working on Google+ but also one of the creators of Google Buzz, wrote.
"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 using Google Takeout," he said.
Google Buzz was a very ambitious social product from Google, created when it realized it had to compete with Twitter and Facebook in some way.
It turned out to be a failure, in most part because of how Google designed some key feature and the botched launch.
Jaiku, a sort of Twitter clone that Google acquired back in 2007 and kept on life support all this time, will also be shut down.
It's interesting, but perhaps sad, that it took Google this long to figure out that it needed a social product, when it ignored the ones it had for so long.
The same thing happened to Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley location-based service which Google acquired in 2005 only to let it die. Crowley went on to create Foursquare in 2009.
Google is also shutting down Code Search and its API on January 15, 2012. Social features, which had been integrated into iGoogle a few years back will be removed. Finally, University Research Program for Google Search is also dead.