While Google has been singing praises about some of its new and more public products such as Google+, other items are unceremoniously on their way out.
First up on the chopping block is Google Labs. That shut down was announced back in July as CEO Larry Page set his mind to cleaning up shop, and now the move will go into effect today.
Also getting the axe will be Google Buzz and its respective API, which makes complete sense as that feature has been rendered useless by status updates on Google+. However, users will still be able to access existing content on Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout once Buzz is gone in a few weeks.
Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product at Google, explained on the official Google blog:
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.
iGoogle is also getting sized down and the social features are being stripped out on January 15, 2012. We can probably take bets now as to when Google will do away with iGoogle altogether and replace it with some future version of Google+ pumped up with widgets and more.
Other products being shut down on January 15:
- Jaiku, a platform acquired in 2007 that enables users send updates to friends (again, useless with Google+)
- Code Search and its API, which enables people to search for open source code online
- The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to Google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers
However, there are plenty of other Google projects we can see being beefed up in the near future, namely Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) along with more features and product integration on Google+. Even Google Translate for Android got a bump up with 12 more languages this week.
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