Google is at it again. It is cleaning up the house by killing a few of its products again. In the last few months, Google has shut down Google Labs, Google Health, Google Powermeter, Aardvark, Desktop, and Fast Flip, as they did not make a huge impact.
And this time the biggest product that is getting killed is Google Buzz. Google Buzz was Google earlier attempt at Social networking taking on Facebook. The idea of using the existing user base of Gmail looked attractive at that time. However, almost immediately after its grand launch, Google Buzz blundered on privacy issues. And it has been a down hill ride ever since. Now with Google+, Google’s new social networking effort, Google Buzz definitely looks out of place for Google.
In addition to Google Buzz, Google is shutting down Jaiku, Code Search, iGoogle’s social features, and University Research Program for Google Search. If you remember, Jaiku started off with Twitter offering microblogging and social networking solution. Jaiku was founded by Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Kopponen in July 2006 and it was acquired by Google in 2007. It has been in a oblivion since then, while twitter has been a huge success.
Announcing the fall cleanup in its blog post, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Product stressed that
Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. 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.
Later, in his Google+ post tiled Buzzkill, Bradley Horowitz added that the biggest lesson learned from Google Buzz is that “We learned privacy is not a feature… it is foundational to the product”.
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