Google Shuts Down Some Minor Projects

Google announced that to make things simpler for user they will be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features.

Google in a post "A fall Spring-clean" on their official blog revealed that "Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, today we’re having a fall spring-clean at Google."

According to Google the sole motive for this cleaning is that they can now devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products.

Here’s a quick overview of where a number of products and features are headed:

Aardvark: An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions.

Desktop: Will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices.

Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications.

Google Pack: People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.

Google Web Security: Much of the web security functionality are integrated directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although their previous sales channel will be discontinued, they’ll continue to support our existing customers.

Image Labeler: Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.

Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. All notebook data will be exported to Google Docs .

Sidewiki: Discontinued to focus instead on our broader social initiatives.

Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people's search results.

There was an interesting point to be noted from the post, Google says "We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential."

It been always pointed out that Google always keep on experimenting new things some got huge success and some are still to be recognized by major portions of users. We saw a recent example of Google TV.

Also Read | Google Acquires Zagat Rated

This is a brave move from Google to clean its house with some of minor projects to focus on big things.

Please share your views with us on this.

Cheers,
Team