Buzzkill: Google Ends Buzz, Other Products
Terrible news for everyone (i.e., almost no one, apparently) that used Buzz, Code Search, Google Labs, Jaiku, iGoogle’s social features, and the University Research Program for Google Search: Google is killing them off, and it’s also merging Boutiques.com and Like.com into Google Product Search, per a Google blog post.
Google has been experimenting with social for a while now, and Google+ seems to be the final fruit of its labors, so it makes sense to clean house regarding its previous (failed) social networking-type applications in Buzz, Jaiku, and iGoogle. It also makes a lot of sense to consolidate Boutiques.com and Like.com into Google Product Search.
It appears that most of the changes will take effect as of January 15, 2012.
The house cleaning follows a big purge-and-merge back in September, when Google announced that it was killing off or consolidating a number of products including Aardvark, Desktop, Google Web Security, and Image Labeler.
Part of Google’s appeal is that it will try anything once, which opens the door for any number of different types of products to gain a foothold. Some of the ideas are better executed than others, and most of them just don’t stick. But you have to hand it to Google for getting rid of what hasn’t worked and taking the best of those ideas and incorporating them into other products to make them better.
Google has been experimenting with social for a while now, and Google+ seems to be the final fruit of its labors, so it makes sense to clean house regarding its previous (failed) social networking-type applications in Buzz, Jaiku, and iGoogle. It also makes a lot of sense to consolidate Boutiques.com and Like.com into Google Product Search.
It appears that most of the changes will take effect as of January 15, 2012.
The house cleaning follows a big purge-and-merge back in September, when Google announced that it was killing off or consolidating a number of products including Aardvark, Desktop, Google Web Security, and Image Labeler.
Part of Google’s appeal is that it will try anything once, which opens the door for any number of different types of products to gain a foothold. Some of the ideas are better executed than others, and most of them just don’t stick. But you have to hand it to Google for getting rid of what hasn’t worked and taking the best of those ideas and incorporating them into other products to make them better.
