Thursday, November 24, 2011

Google continues its Autumn clearance

INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT Google is continuing its Autumn cleaning and has announced that it will close out more products, including Gears and Friend Connect.

The firm is shutting down products that have not had the impact it had hoped for, said Urs Hölzle, SVP of Operations and Google Fellow in a blog post that sees off the products.

"Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience," he said.

Seven projects have been shuttered and they range from the simple to the far more elaborate.
Google Bookmarks Lists, for example, was a way of sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which is something well catered for anyway. Google will close this down on 19 December.

More elaborate is the 'Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE < C)' initiative that aimed to cut the cost of renewable energy. The work done here so far has been published, so all is not wasted.

"At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level," said Hölzle.
"We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy-including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies."

Also nixed are Google Friend Connect, a webmaster tool for adding social features to web sites, and the social networking stumble, Google Wave.
This makes sense, perhaps, since Google has more recently launched Google+, its social networking service. The firm recommends that any affected web sites add a Google+ badge to their web pages instead.

You can also wave goodbye to Google Gears, whose demise has been on the cards since March when Google stopped supporting new web browsers for it and discontinued its offline development extensions.

Google Search Timeline, a visual way of showing historical search queries, has also had its time, as has Knol, a collaboration tool. Users have about a year to wean themselves off the latter.

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