Google says goodbye to some of its products
Search engine giants Google have recently announced that they will be clearing out a load of their products that ‘haven’t had the impact they hoped for’. Google announced this in their blog as part of their off-season spring cleaning series.
All in all there will be seven products receiving their marching orders, including the infamous ‘Google Wave’. Wave was a product that many thought, including Google, would have a huge impact on the way we interacted with the web and would enable the user to combine an email client, messenger service, image and document sharing all into one interface. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite to plan as there was compatibility issues with Internet Explorer from the outset, they faced huge competition from the likes of Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, and the general interface seemed quite confused. Due to this I think its no surprise that Google has finally axed it!
Google also got rid of the ‘bookmark lists’ that allowed users to share their bookmarks and collaborate with others online. Google Friend connect has been discontinued which was a social networking tool for webmasters where you could share your online profile with others and Google are now advising existing users to migrate to the Google+ page system in order to link your website.
One of the other relatively high profile products that are being removed is Google Gears web browser plugin and they have said that this is ‘part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5’. Another is ‘Knol’ which was launched in 2007 in order to improve web content through the sharing of articles online which was supposed to contribute highly to greater SEO but this didn’t really work out. Amongst the others to be removed are Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C), and Google Search Timeline.
With this fresh cleanup of Google’s services it will mean that they can devote more time and attention to their other products which many web designers and SEO managers will be keeping a close eye on, especially with the continued growth of Google+.
