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Google Terminates Six Services

Posted by Soulskill on from the hasta-la-vista,-baby dept.

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."

7 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  2. Highlights one of the problems.. by onion2k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    http://twitter.com/onion2k
    1. Re:Highlights one of the problems.. by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      In the case of gmail and those apps, since it's out for domains that actually pay Google for the service - I suppose the risk isn't as severe at all and 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.

      It's about calculated risk and perspective. The specific google services you mentioned are very low risk of being discontinued. The actual ones being discontinued had good reasons: Google Video was redundant with Google owning youtube. Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo. I don't know enough about the others, but they are not in the same league as gmail, which probably is almost as important to google as is its search in some ways.

  3. Obscure services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Obscure services by Dionysus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Google services are obscure but the people who want them can and probably will find them, especially if theyre useful.

      How do you look for something you don't even know exists?

      --
      Je ne parle pas francais.
    2. Re:Obscure services by AndreR · · Score: 5, Funny

      How do you look for something you don't even know exists?

      You google it?

  4. Re:Hmm by htnmmo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.