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Google Buzz Buzzing Away
MrCrassic writes "It looks like the glory days of Google Buzz have finally come to an end. Google has formally announced the termination of this service to concentrate their efforts on Google+. From the article: 'In a few weeks we'll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won't be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.' Other products, such as Code Search, the Google Labs website and Jaiku, will also be on the chopping block.
Google+ is next for the chop because the company just don't care about it enough, in my view. Not enough momentum to make it work, Facebook is just too big now and it is not going to succeed, I don't think.
Code Search is the part I'll miss the most. Great for searching code samples (such as using threads in Perl etc) with some context (instead of a one-line snippet) and without junk like Experts-Exchange or unanswered forum posts. I also like the ability to search code inside a library along with third-party projects using this library, great for bugfixing.
Google is turning into Bing now. Answering common questions with helper scripts (flight info), and forwarding the user to Wikipedia if there is no predefined script. Except that Bing is doing this because their *real* search engine is a joke.
Apart from their core search Google are beginning to loose face, far to many projects started and thrown out. Who is going to invest time and effort using a google service when there is a good chance that it is going to be pulled? Unlike software installed on a computer you are forced to migrate when google decides to shut things down. It's not as though you can just carry on using the service until it no longer meets your needs. Not just a google problem but a wider problem for the whole software as a service concept.
Today's announcement that Google is shutting down several services highlights one of the risks of the "Cloud". Your service provider can decide to shut down, and you have no control over it. My approach, rather, is to keep the primary copy of my data locally. I use the Cloud for backup, and when I want to share data with other people, or myself when I am mobile. Depending on the Cloud for something critical is very risky unless you have a written contract with your provider to keep the service going.
Google, champion of the browser-based app, is inadvertently showing us the dark side of the 'cloud' concept.
When a installed app is discontinued by the provider you still get to use the last version for as long as you want.
When a cloud app gets discontinued, it's just gone.
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
Is that their indefinitely long beta runs and half-assed tools have kinda driven me away from them. The best tools they have are things that they have acquired after already doing well. The only original things I've ever seen them do well are gmail and search engine. Almost everything else seems really janky and thrown together to try to steal some of a market that they're trying to jump into several years too late. I understand the attempt to integrate it into a single sign-on, but I'm just tired of a ton of crappy tools that can't really be used well.