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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.
They also announced that they're shutting down codesearch. That's much bigger news as far as I'm concerned. Sad to see a great tool disappear.
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.
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.