In the News: Google To Slash Off 6 Redundant Projects
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Google has decided to terminate several products that weren't up to the Google's standards or now redundant.
In a few months, support for uploads to Google Video will be discontinued and YouTube and Picasa Web Albums will be left to handle the video uploads.
In 2001, Google Catalog Search was launched as a demonstration of OCR technology and lead to Google's Book Search which hasn't been as popular as some of Google's other products. Catalog search will be given a farewell on 15th January 2009.
Starting next week, Google plans to stop active development on Google Notebook, but will continue to maintain the service for those who've already signed up via the web interface here. The official Google notebook blog also provides information about other products which offer Notebook's functionalities.
Dodgeball, the mobile social network acquired by Google that lets users share their location with friends via text message is also being shutdown in the next couple of months as it is getting replaced by other popular mobile social networks like twitter.
Once Jaiku is migrated to Google App Engine ,a new Jaiku Engine project will be released on Google Code under the Apache License which will act as an open source microblogging platform .Development will halt and a group of Google volunteers will take care of the existing service.
The Google Mashup Editor which is currently in limited private beta, shutdown in 6 months in favour of the more powerful App Engine infrastructure.
Other Google products joining this long list to be terminated are:
- Knol - Google's Wikipedia competitor,
- Grand Central - an advanced telecom service and
- Google Base - an online database
I've came across countless Google applications in my two years of computering life. Whether web-based or host-based, there are lots of them that are just in the way. I have no needs for most of the Google products and services except perhaps for some like Chrome, Google Earth and Blogger. So most of the rest seems to be redundant, as even Google themselves has marked them as 'failed'.
So if you asked me whether i like this piece of news or not, i will answer a whopping big "yes". It's less of a pain trying to keep up with their latest news, anyway...From a corporation's point of view, killing off these failed projects is also a way for Google to boost a healthy account during these dark economic periods.
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