Google's Fall Spring Cleaning

With the advent of Google+, many of Google's services have become redundant. In a bout of off -season spring cleaning, the Google team is shutting down many of these programs. Programs on the chopping block include:


• Buzz - Buzz is the social sharing network I have written about in the past. It has been eclipsed by Google+ and other services that beat Google to the punch on this front.

• Jaiku - Another social sharing network that allows users to post snippets and share short links. Unlike Buzz, Jaiku could be used to share photos and the like.

• iGoogle sharing - iGoogle was a sort of personalized homepage for your internet experience. They added games and gadgets for more interactivity (like old Yahoo! homepages, remember those?) The social gadgets let you share your favorite things with other iGoogle users - from your to-do list, to games, to articles.

• Bookmarks list - this feature let users share their bookmarks with friends.

• Friend connect - this feature lets users add social features to their websites, including making registration easy and allowing you to add ratings and commenting to content.

• Gears - this feature allowed users to create offline web apps. They are discontinuing this feature in an effort to move into HTML5, an updated language for web design that allows a lot of fancy new application programming and such. HTML5, in combination with CSS3 allows developers to do a lot of things that previously could only be done by the use of things like Flash.

• Search Timeline - this feature let users look at historical search data. This can now be found by using the Google Trends or Insights features.

• Wave - I wrote about the wave before. This was a really neat idea that just never caught on, which allowed users to interact, webchat, and share files throughout their development.

• Knol - This service allowed experts to work together to create and publish web content.