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Google To Shutter Knol, Wave, Gears

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-you-don't-know-what-knol-is-look-it-up-on-wikipedia dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect, Google has outlined a plan to close down Wave. The experimental communication medium will go read-only on January 31, and on April 30 they will shut it down completely. Also on April 30, Google will be changing Knol so that individual knols are not viewable, though users will still be able to download and export them until October 1, at which point they'll disappear entirely. Google Gears is also getting the axe, as is Search Timeline and the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative."

5 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They cancel products left and right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least Google did the right thing with Wave and made it open source:
    http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-in-a-box

    Still, I'll miss the old girl. At least I have hopes that eventually I'll have a company-wide Wave server to replace Wikis (which have horrible access control) and email (which is just horrible).

  2. Re:Welcome to the cloud! by icebraining · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could also run Wave yourself: Google has made it Open Source and it's now an Apache project: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/index.html

    --
    Dilbert RSS feed
  3. Re:Wave (frown) = Sun Microsystems by AuMatar · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you started a company who's success was dependent on a third party with no contractual obligation giving away something for free, you deserve to fail. For sheer stupidity of not having a backup plan, if nothing else.

    --
    I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  4. Re:life cycle of a cloud by yo303 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Funny, but no, OP is correct. Clouds are condensed water droplets: liquid. Gaseous water is invisible.

  5. Re:They cancel products left and right by RManning · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree completely.

    We had a production issue one day, and the team was spread all over the country at the time. We decided Wave would be perfect for collaboration. Signing up was easy enough, but every conversation got threaded in weird ways, we couldn't figure out how to tell what had been read or not. It was a total mess. After an hour or so we gave up and just used a chat room.

    I'm not saying it wouldn't have worked for us, but we could not figure it out.