Google silences Buzz and kills off Code Search
Google is to shut down Buzz, its Gmail-integrated information-sharing system, as part of a wider paring-down of its product portfolio.
The company said on Friday that Buzz and the service's API would be closed down in a few weeks' time, so Google can focus on its more recent and comprehensive Google+ social network. Other products to go include Code Search, a tool that was designed to help developers search the web for open-source code.
Friday also saw the shuttering of the Google Labs product prototyping facility — a move that Google announced in July.
"We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought — thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don't work on," Google product chief Bradley Horowitz wrote in a blog post on Friday.
Buzz was announced in February 2010, with Google promising a system that would intelligently suggest shared content that the user would find useful. However, as with Google's other big social product of that year, Wave, it failed to catch on. Wave was killed off in August 2010.
Google will also close down the micro-blogging service Jaiku, Horowitz said on Friday. Google already effectively downgraded the product in 2009, when it said it would pass its maintenance on to volunteers within the company.
As with Buzz, Google will let users export the Jaiku data they have already uploaded. In the case of Buzz, though, it will also be possible to view existing content through Google Profiles.
The social features of the iGoogle portal will also fall victim to the firm's focus on Google+, Horowitz said, although non-social iGoogle apps will stay put. The company had made it possible in 2009 for iGoogle users to share photos, videos and other information through the portal, while also using it to play simple online games and quizzes.
According to Horowitz, iGoogle will go non-social on 15 January next year. On the same day, Google will also shut down API access to its search results for academic researchers.
"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past," Horowitz wrote. "We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+."