Mountain View, California — Google’s grand mission to organize the world’s information has shattered to pieces over the weekend as it announced the abandonment of two most influential projects: Google Health that stored users’ health and PowerMeter software that allowed them to monitor and manage energy consumption.
The imminent closure of Google Health and PowerMeter, neither of which achieved the critical mass that Google felt would be necessary to continue it, represents a considerable narrowing of ambitions for a company that has reached for the stars and supported the missons to the moon.
Introduced in May 2008, Google Health was the company’s humongous endeavors that “did not scaled as quickly as Google would like,” to help people access their personal health records online, no matter where they are, from any computing device, through a secure portal.
“Now, with a few years of experience, we have discovered that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would,” wrote Google Health Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown June 24.
“There has been feeble adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But, during this period we have not found a way to transform that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people,” he said.
The Google Health portal, a free service that keeps your personal health information, will be closed beginning January 1, 2012, though users will be able to download their health data through Jan. 1, 2013. Google Health data will be deleted after that period.
Moreover, Google Health lets users log in to the service at google.com/health to import their medical records, fill prescriptions, and get lab results, set up text-based pill alerts, keep track of immunizations, and get pertinent news alerts. The last major update was in Sept. 2010, when the company revamped the site to place more of an emphasis on wellness.
The company says it will attempt to make it simple for people to gather their data saved on these services and transition to other, similar services. Users can download their personal records from the site in one of several formats: printable PDF; a CCR (Continuity of Care Record) an XML format that can be imported into other personal health tools such as Microsoft HealthVault; CSV (comma-separated value) files that can be imported into spreadsheets and database programs; and via a ZIP archive.
Some people were pretty careful about entrusting their personal health care records to Google, but the fact is that the service never got attracted because the vast majority of people simply are not ready or willing to store and access their records online. Now, once the curtain is pulled, over the coming weeks Google will also be adding the ability to directly transfer your health data to other services that support the Direct Project protocol, an emerging open standard for efficient health data exchange, the company said.
Another disastrous service that was introduced in February 2009 was, Google PowerMeter through its philanthropic arm as a Web application that can help consumers track their daily home energy usage in real time from an iGoogle gadget on their computers, will be retired on September 16, 2011.
In PowerMeter’s case, more and more information is being made available to consumers online, as with the controversial SmartMeter from Pacific Gas & Electric. The tool, which draws information from a home smart meter, was tested by utility companies in California, Texas, Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Canada and Kentucky.
Interestingly, as recently as April of this year, Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl noted that since launching the product, people are paying more attention to tracking their energy consumption, with the notion of smart meters and other home-energy devices gaining steam in California and Texas.
But over the weekend the company abruptly announced the closure: “We are pleased that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of this access and created something of a model. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service,” Weihl said.
“Momentum is building toward making energy information more readily accessible, and it is exciting to see others drive innovation and pursue opportunities in this important new market,” Brown and Weihl wrote. “We are proud of what we have accomplished with PowerMeter and look forward to what will develop next in this space.”
The failure to scale is the primary reason Google is shutting the project down. However, PowerMeter users will have access to the tool until September 16, 2011, though users may download their data by logging in to their account and going to “Account Settings” to export to a CSV file.