Google Buzz Gets the Ax
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Google announced on Friday that it will be terminating its Google Buzz service in the upcoming weeks. The news comes on the heels of Google’s announcement that its latest social networking attempt Google+ has more than 40 million users.
"To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on," said Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz in a Google blog post. "It's why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products."
Google Buzz users will still be able to view existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout. [Read: 10 Inventions That Were Ahead of Their Time]
Google also announced that its service Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
Jaiku, a product the company acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012, as well as iGoogle's social features. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are, Horowitz noted.
Also closing is the University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers.
In addition, Google Labs site will shut down on Friday, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.
"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+," Horowitz said.
