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."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Its first recession.

[ionix5891]

some more interesting reading today Why Google Employees Quit

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[betterunixthanunix]

"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?

Re:Alternatives for Google Notebook?

[darrylo]

Actually Google Notebook is very handy, especially when you are not using your computer and want to jot down some notes.

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:

• Searching is much faster.
• Works offline.
• Can sync offline databases between multiple PCs (and Macs!).
• I can access the same database from any web browser (the data is mirrored on Evernote's servers, as well as your PCs and Macs).
• Works on the iPhone (but data is stored on Evernote's servers, and not on the iPhone, unless you individually marks notes on the iPhone).
• It's free for light to moderate usage (you get roughly 40MB of notes per month, free).
• Because searching is fast, I'm now using it for bookmarks. I've migrated all of my del.icio.us bookmarks into it (along with descriptive web page fragments).