Google has had a tradition of introducing new products and axing other products. On one hand, the search engine giant is coming up with Dart and improvements related to Google Translate, and on the other hand it has axed many services. Latest to its addition of axed products, is Google Buzz. Google Labs faced the chopping block, but its shutting down took a real good time as they announced the same in July, which will go into effect today.
Google Buzz, along with its respective API, will get axed. Many analysts were of the thought that Google should have axed this service long back as it has been rendered useless by status updates on Google+. As a completely different product, Buzz might have actually had nothing great to deliver, but as an extension to one’s Google account, it has been useful for many users. For the said purpose, Google has still allowed its users access to Buzz via their Google Profile. One can even use Google Takeout once Buzz is gone in a few weeks.
The official Google blog had Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product at Google, detailing the product’s axing as below:
We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.
Buzz however is not the only product feeling the cut, as iGoogle is also getting sized down. January 15, 2012 will see the social features being stripped out. Google, replacing iGoogle altogether, it can be expected that the to-be-replaced by a few future version of Google+ being pumped up with widgets and more.
The January 15 axed list includes the following products:
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Jaiku, a platform acquired in 2007 that enables users send updates to friends (again, useless with Google+)
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Code Search and its API, which enables people to search for open source code online
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The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to Google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers
Google basically has so many products coming in, that a number of products seem to miss out on the show. This results in shutting down of services, sooner or later by the search engine giant. Google might have a few projects, which are in the ‘much-awaited’ list, as Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). It assures that Google’s future with a number of projects would still be bright, but every product might not still see the limelight.
Google Buzz was announced in February 2010, which was Google’s attempt to battle with Twitter in the microblogging social media space. But the attempt was a lame one, as it was not appreciated in the world of microbloggers. The attempt was poorly executed, which led to many forecasting the removal of the product long back.
Google had recently even replaced Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites with Google Product Search.