By Sudarshana Banerjee

“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president, Products, tell us in a blog post. Users will still be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.

Buzz is not the only Google product to get the metaphorical axe. As was previously announced by the company, Google plans to shut down a list of services, including Aardvark, Desktop, Google Apps, and Sidewiki. The Google Labs site is shutting down, and Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search. There is more. Jaiku, a product the company acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012 (Any point in wondering again why Google’s social initiatives have been so widely unsuccessful for the most part?)

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. iGoogle’s social features will disappear on January 15, 2012 (a not so gentle nudge by the company towards Google+). iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are. The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to Google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

Bradley Horowitz (Vice President, Product, Google): 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+.

 

Sudarshana Banerjee is consulting editor with techtaffy.com. She can be reached at [email protected]