San Francisco— In a spate of different posts on various official Google blogs late Wednesday evening, the company’s long knives has take its imminent toll not only on some of its employees, but on a batch of products too, some more broadly available than others: Google Notebook,
, Google Catalog Search, microblogging service
, and the Google Mashup Editor, these products according to Google have not found much traction lately.While it is difficult to argue Google’s presence in daily online life, not everything the Mountain View, Calif.-based company touches turns to gold. On various company blogs, Google announced it will cease to support a number of Web-based services, including Google Video, Google Notebook and Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking service that lets users share their location with friends via text message.
Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in a blog post that the company will also be porting Jaiku, a micro-blogging site, over to Google App Engine. “After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License,” he wrote.
“With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups, and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine,” he said. “The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we are excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.”
“While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.”
Another decaying signs appeared on Google Video when it bought YouTube in 2006. Starting, “in a few months,” Google Video will no longer allow user uploads.
“Do not worry, we are not removing any content already uploaded on Google Video — this just means that you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service,” product manager Michael Cohen wrote in a blog post. “We have always maintained that Google Video’s strength is in the search technology that makes it possible for people to search videos from across the Web, regardless of where they may be hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.”
Gundotra also stated that Google would be closing down Google Mashup editor, a tool for making Web service mashups that has been in closed beta testing. Much, if not all, of the functionality of Google Mashup Editor is available through Google App Engine, and Gundotra is encouraging users to transition their applications to Google App Engine.
Other applications that will become part of closure is: Catalog Search, an application that makes it possible to search the full text of product catalogs. “In recent years, Catalog Search has not been as popular as some of our other products,” product manager Punit Soni explained in a blog post. “So tomorrow, we are bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”
Google Notebook, an application that allows users to organize clips of information when conducting research online, will also stop receiving support, wrote product manager Raj Krishnan. However, Google will continue to maintain service for those users who have already signed up. Krishnan also listed other Google applications that have Notebook-like functionality, such as SearchWiki and GoogleDocs.
The move is much like trimming the herd as Google search for ways to cut back ever so slightly on engineering and to divert resources to projects that may have a chance or making money or could be more powerful when it comes to the same functions.