Google has announced that they are ending their Twitter rival, Buzz to make way for Facebook rival Google Plus. Google CEO Larry Page is using every opportunity he has to streamline Google by getting rid of the least popular products.
Although Google have not announced an official end date for Buzz, they have said that it will be closed within a few weeks. However, existing Buzz posts will still be viewable on users Google or Google Plus profiles and Google Takeout will allow users to download posts to their computers.
Google are also planning on removing Code Search and the Code Search API, which are designed to give programmers easier access to open source code all over the internet.
Among other products to be axed is the friend updater Jaiku, (bought in 2007) the University Research Program for Google Search and the iGoogle search features as these will be replaced by the features in Google Plus. These changes are due to be completed by the 15th of January next year.
Another change destined to be made by the internet giant is the installation of Google Product Search, which will replace Boutiques.com and Like.com. It is understood that Google Labs is among the other less popular products to be offloaded.
Buzz is the most high profile product to get the axe and was only launched in 2010 as a rival to twitter, however there were privacy issues and an automatic opt-in feature which caused users to react negatively and the product never recovered despite a few half-hearted efforts to revive it.
Google’s VP of Product, Bradley Horowitz has been quoted as saying “We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day.”
And on the recent and future product removal, he said, “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. … We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.”
What do you think? Will you miss any of these products or are Google being smart to dump the dead weight? Tell us your thought in the comments section below.
I personally think Google are taking the right decision in axing services which have become less popular. Although I use Buzz to announce my latest blog posts, I feel that this service has somewhat lost it’s appeal since the launch of Google+.
I agree Derek, it will be interesting to see if Google+ ends up going the same way as Buzz though!