Google shutters Video, Jaiku, Dodgeball and others
By Dave Jeyes
A wave of announcements hit Google product blogs yesterday, separately announcing the demise of floundering products. Could it be that even the almighty Google is feeling the pinch of the economic slowdown?
Users of Google Video will no longer be able to upload new content to the service. Existing video will be maintained for the time being, but the Product Manager recommends that users, “explore YouTube’s dynamic global community or Picasa Web Album.”
Twitter clone Jaiku is being converted into an open source project. This means that while Google will no add features to the code, anyone can roll their own micro-blogging service based on the project.
Google is also shutting down both Dodgeball and the Google Mashup Editor projects. Dodgeball was a mobile social network that held a lot of promise. Google Mashup Editor on the other hand made creating mashups even more difficult by forcing you to learn its unusual syntax.
Another interesting project headed for the deadpool is Google Catalog Search. This was the precursor to Google Book Search wherein employees scanned hundreds of product catalogs into digital format. This is also the conceptual background for Froogle, now Google Product Search.
Google is also stopping new development on Google Notebook. Notebook allows users to collect and organize information from across the web in a document that can be viewed from any web browser.
These are the first signs of Google’s efforts to start controlling costs. This is a change of pace for a company that lets engineers drive product development by adopting passion projects such as these.
In addition, Google is starting to trim headcount and close office spaces in some locations. The company announced the elimination of 100 recruiters from its organization.
Google offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden will be shuttered in coming months. These offices represent the displacement of approximately 70 more employees.
While none of these announcements are earth-shattering, they do represent a newfound discipline around managing costs at Google. It will be interesting to see how the employee base responds to the cuts and how they impact innovation at the search giant.
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January 15th, 2009
Google has YouTube. It would make no sense for them to maintain 2 video-sharing websites at a time.
January 15th, 2009
It just sounds like Google is growing up, and becoming sensible when it comes to costs. Interesting that it took a recession…