As a web services company, Google is known for its extremely successful services, most of which have been lapped up by customers from across the globe. However, not all of its services have been successful and Google knows it. In a new blog post, Google has announced its plans to retire a few of them which didn’t have the desired effect.
In all, a total of seven Google initiatives have been killed. Let’s take a look at each of them now.
Google Bookmark Lists: The first of the services that would go offline is something known as Google Bookmark lists. This was an experimental feature that let users share bookmarks and links with their friends. In case you were using this, all your bookmarks would be retained. You will however not be able to create new ones. The services go “off air” on December 19, 2011.
Google Friend Connect: Thanks to the advent of Google+, Google seems to be more than happy to kill its Friend Connect service that let webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. The service would however continue to work on Blogger blogs.
Google Gears: Google Gears was an interesting service that let users access Google services offline. However, with the advent of HTML5 and Google’s developments on that front wherein almost all of its services can be accessed offline without Gears, Google has decided to retire Google Gears completely. Back in March Google Gears’ browser extension was retired. The services would no longer work starting December 1.
Google Search Timeline: Google would also be retiring its Search Timeline functionality that let users view a historical graph of historical results for a search query.
Google Wave: Google Wave made big news when it was first introduced back in May 2009. However, once the fanciness wore off, people were happy to stick to more traditional means of communication and sharing. Some even said that Google Wave was ahead of its time. Google had announced back in March that it would be shutting down the product. It has now once again revealed that starting January 31, 2012 all content in Wave would be read-only.
Knol: Knol was launched back in 20017 as a competitor to Wikpedia – but a far more reliable one with the editors of the articles on the site being certified experts in their respective fields. However, the service did not take off and now Google has decided to pull the plug on it. The service would go offline on April 30, 2012. For those who want to keep an archive of their Knols, they can download them or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, Knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible, said Google.
