It’s not surprising to hear that Google Buzz will be closed in a few weeks. Google now focuses on Google+, a product that learned from Buzz’s slip-ups and became a lot more popular than Buzz. “We learned privacy is not a feature… it is foundational to the product. (…) But probably the best lesson we learned is about how to introduce a product. We started very slowly with Google+ — in a limited Field Trial – in order to listen and learn and gather plenty of real-world feedback,” says Google’s Bradley Horowitz.
I’ll miss Buzz because it was a lot more simple than Google+, it was integrated with Gmail and it allowed me to automatically share my favorite Google Reader posts. Buzz will continue to power the Google+ activity stream, but it will no longer be a Gmail feature.
It’s not surprising to hear that Google will close Jaiku, a product acquired back in 2007 that was later open-sourced or that Google will disable iGoogle’s social features powered by OpenSocial. They weren’t popular because iGoogle didn’t integrate with a social network.
What’s surprising is to hear that Google will shut down Code Search, probably the best search engine for open source code. Code Search had a great API that was used in plug-ins for software like Eclipse. It was a brilliant way to find useful code and Google, the big proponent of open source, will close it.
“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. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products,” explains Bradley Horowitz.
You can still use Buzz, Code Search and Jaiku until January 15 2012. “In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.” I’m sure that these aren’t the only Google services that will be closed: at some point orkut, Knol, Google Toolbar, Google Bookmarks will have to go away.
