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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."
This just highlights one of the negative aspects of using services out there on the net - if it's not running on your physical hardware it can be closed when the company decides it's not profitable to carry on with it. In the case of these services I doubt there's anyone relying on them to do business, but that definitely isn't the case for things that run in the various compute clouds, or small companies migrating to things like Google Docs, GMail or Google Calendar.
I wouldn't run anything business critical on something I couldn't replace very easily.
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Much of the reason why Google became popular was because of its clean front page. Other search engines like Altavista made you load a pile of superfluous stuff when you just wanted to search. But this has come back to bite Google because unless you hunt them out, you'll never know most of Google's services even exist.
Maybe nobody cares about your gaming videos? And maybe it is because of junk like that they are closing it down?
I have quite a number of bookmarks and notes stored in Google Notebook, I wonder if there are similar web-based services available on the net? Actually Google Notebook is very handy, especially when you are not using your computer and want to jot down some notes.
some more interesting reading today Why Google Employees Quit
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).
This is why Software as a Service is never a good idea. You can have a ton of data stored on that service and it can be discontinued at any time. This is why when I do use Google Docs, I have the data backed up on our own site, and this is also why I won't use Microsoft Live! alternatives to Office.
It is designed to create vendor lock-in. I do not trust the likes of Microsoft to provide a data export option should they decide the service is not working. Thankfully Google has at least up to now been honorable in providing the means to retrieve data even when products have ceased, and provided PLENTY of notice (we knew what, two years ago that Google Video was going to die?) when discontinuation of hosted services were planned.
In light of this. F/OSS and "shared source" solutions you host yourself (or at least have FULL access to not only the data but also the code) is the best solution, and even proprietary/closed-source shrinkwrap software where you have both the software and the data in-house are the best solutions. Even closed-source software with craptivation, er, activation and per-use license verification schemes are vastly superior because should the vendor die, cracking the checks to continue your right of first sale to use the product can still be exercised in the very worst cases.
In this case users are fortunate it's Google services because as stated above Google provides plenty of notice and the means to retrieve data - and in the case of some tools have even have open source so you can continue use of the service in your own hosted environment. Don't expect that to be the case with other SaaS solutions when they are terminated.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I was recently looking over Google's AdSense revenues and noticed that they were quite low.
While their own site's earnings have been growing, the earnings of their AdSense publishers has leveled off.
The cut they take from AdSense revenues has also gotten smaller and smaller. I was wondering if Google might abandon AdSense all together because of it.
What's probably keeping AdSense alive is the $500 million they keep in the bank because of their net 60 payment terms and because people don't get paid until they reach $100.
Half a billion dollar hit wouldn't look nice.
Seems like they're working on improving the results in that area, but these other services just couldn't be monetized properly.
It's nice though. If Google were to give every service online away for free, it would leave little room for other developers to grab a piece off the (shrinking?) pie.
The similarity between http://notebook.zoho.com/ and the usual Google login pages is strong enough to qualify as phishing...