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Google Terminates Six Services
Jonah Bomber writes with this excerpt from Information Week:
"In addition to Google's announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it's discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video. ... Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license."
You can still use it! See http://googlenotebookblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/stopping-development-on-google-notebook.html "Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up."
some more interesting reading today Why Google Employees Quit
"I would definitely recommend using Google to host school email (not all business for other reasons) as it can save a lot of money and provide much better end user experience."
I would recommend against it, and I would be adamant about it. GMail's service is terrible; every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client). School email can require the same level of reliability and availability as business email, at least at the college level: financial aid notices, graduate school applications, job applications, etc. Being unable to access your email can be a serious problem, and frankly, Google's service has not shown itself to be reliable enough for anything beyond irrelevant personal emails.
There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?
Palm trees and 8
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).
If you have an iPhone, Evernote has an app that accesses your online Evernote database.
I used to use Google notebook, which is still nice, but I've since switched to Evernote. I like Evernote because:
So far as I can tell, gmail is more reliable than my university's email.
Then again, these are the same guys who destroyed one of my professor's laptops when trying to install Visual Studio Pro.
It always works for me (free gmail service) with IMAP. I've had a couple of issues where I had to "unlock" my account with their captcha verification.
Of course, when you PAY for the Google Apps service, 99.9% uptime is guaranteed and Gmail isn't 'beta' anymore...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I gather from Google engineers that this issue is caused by the abuse throttling features of GMail. If there's a botnet hitting Google on your subnet, or if your access patterns seem suspicious (which for me seems to include accessing my account from home, work and phone all by IMAP, but as usual the Googler's couldn't be specific about what triggers it) then they'll block you out until you pass a CAPTCHA.
It's pretty annoying since you can't exactly send spam over IMAP. I guess the underlying service is what does the checking, and it can't tell the difference between SMTP, IMAP, and calls from the Web UI.