Google To Kill Wave, Gears, Friend Connect And More Products In Third Round Of 'Spring Cleaning'

Google on Tuesday announced the third round of its "spring cleaning" effort, aimed at streamlining its product offerings across the web.

According to a post on the Google Blog written by the Senior Vice President, Operations and Google Fellow Urs Hölzle, the company is taking the axe to the following products and services: Google Wave, Google Gears, Google Friend Connect, Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Search Timeline, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

Unlike some of the products on this list, Wave is going away altogether. Hailed as an "email killer" when it launched in 2009, Google Wave failed to catch on over the course of its first few months, and the company announced plans to terminate the project in August 2010. According to Hölzle's post, the service will become read-only on January 31, 2012 and will go dark on April 30.

"You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off," Hölzle explains. "If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround."

Web app development tool Google Gears, which the company began phasing out in March, will be shuttered by the end of the year. "On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download," wrote Hölzle.

Friend Connect, a tool that let developers add social features to third-party sites, will be usable only for Google's blogging platform, Blogger, as of March 1, 2012. Hölzle said that current users should create pages on the web giant's social network, Google+. "We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch," Hölzle wrote on the Google Blog.

(Visit the blog post to see what Google has planned for Bookmarks Lists, Search Timeline, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.)

Google has been cleaning house since it launched Google+ over the summer. In October, Google shuttered Buzz, its failed social network from 2010 that generated a huge privacy controversy during its early days. The company also announced at the same time that it would kill off Jaiku, iGoogle's social features and other products.

In September, the company announced that it would clear out 10 products, including Desktop, Notebook, Fast Flip, Aardvark and others. While a few products were axed entirely, features from some were rolled into Google+ or other, more popular Google services.

Google announced in October that 40 million users had signed up for Google+. If that number continues to climb, you can expect to see even more periodic cleanings-out of products and services.

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Comments

[Layman23]

02:04 PM on 11/25/2011

You have to appreciate the fact that they realize it and are scrapping bad products rather than trying to push it to the consumers.

[wwhatever747]

05:17 PM on 11/24/2011

More likely 3rd round of virus cleansing...that keps on splashing at their faces.

[wwhatever747]

05:16 PM on 11/24/2011

Look at his sad face. Can't win it, this is a new generation of CEO BUSTERS!

[CatherineAdenle]

03:55 PM on 11/24/2011

Google must learn to say no to a thousand things and yes to one big thing.

[LenP]

11:48 PM on 11/24/2011

Well said. But you know that old theory; "If you throw enough crap at the wall, sooner or later some of it will stick"...it seems to be their motto.

[rybalaw]

11:30 AM on 11/24/2011

I know that the clash of the titans e.g. Apple vs Google at a Federal District Court is going to happen sooner than later. Apple Vs Samsung is what the Spanish Civil war was to WWII. It is also my understanding that gmail will not be available to Blackberry users because Google now owns Motorola and has decided to put Research in Motion out of business.

[ruyen]

07:29 AM on 11/24/2011

Wave needed to be integrated into GMail, the only reason I didn't use it was because it was a separate app/site.

[Craig Koebelin]

08:05 PM on 11/23/2011

They schedule "Spring Cleaning" for Autumn, that says it all.

They should have a cleaning of all those no-good content farms that pollute search results.

[JustMyWords]

11:52 AM on 11/26/2011

Google has made multiple major changes to the algorithm in the last year designed specifically to address the 'content farms' issue. Problem is, their changes have hugely damaged many sites with (mostly) good quality content, because there's no way for an algorithm to tell the difference between well researched and written content and poorly researched and sloppy written schlock. To me, a google search has become a crapshoot - the stuff coming to the top is even worse than before. Instead of a content site, it's returning random blogs full of plagiarized content stolen from those 'content farms' and run through a spinner. I'd rather have the content farm.

[DAE]

06:22 PM on 11/23/2011

And people complain about wasteful government spending.

[vicki558]

05:10 PM on 11/23/2011

BING

[Joe Moore]

04:06 PM on 11/23/2011

I had to remind myself what these were after reading the list. Nothing I'm going to personally miss.

[craftycrow]

02:59 PM on 11/23/2011

I really just use Google for a search engine.

[LenP]

11:49 PM on 11/24/2011

Because that's all it is.

[redmaple]

12:57 PM on 11/25/2011

Earth, SketchUp, Voice.

[DRaymond]

01:22 PM on 11/23/2011

For the IT community this brings up a serious concers: At what point can you trust a Google Technology? Certainly Android, gmail, and Google Docs aren't going away, but Buzz and Wave were announced with the same 'this is going to be the next big thing' enthusiasm and commitment. With software you own you can limp along with a stabilized release and internal support. There are still plenty of substantial companies still chugging along with Lotus Notes. But when the Google Wave servers go dark, that's it. For an IT department adopting a technology is a huge investment in both money and effort in overcoming organizational inertia. The IT department puts its own credibility on the line by endorsing the technology. Often one person places his whole future career on the line by heading up the project. Imagine the poor IT staff person tasked with developing the plan and implement rolling out Wave to an enterprise. Not only is his job toast but putting 'Wave' on his resume is going to be worse than useless. So, put yourself in the role of an IT manager of even a small two dozen person firm considering whether to go with laptops or chromebooks for your next buy. Can you really undertake the huge effort in retraining users and getting rid of the last bits of client software with the risk that Google might halt development on Chrome OS in order to concentrate on Android and that vendors will stop making new models.

[juliedc]

01:08 PM on 11/23/2011

I use Google for all sorts of things but I have to say, I've never heard of any of these projects. I've had to abandon paying them for ads since I'm the 'little guy' and don't have time to spend trying to stay ahead of the pack, researching or guessing what will make Google happy. Much easier to just use Facebook for ads. Trying to find help for anything Google is practically impossible which is weird since they're Google. I typically have to 'google' an answer from an external source since finding answers from within Google is beyond difficult. I wish it weren't so. I wish they would slow down the development and put time into help and support for what they already have. It's not rocket science and it shouldn't be a big mystery to use all of their cool stuff.

[Master-T]

01:04 PM on 11/23/2011

It's about time. Google could easily axe another two dozen dead weight projects over there, but is likely trying to save face by only killing a few at a time. That's the end-result of letting engineers run the place. Shareholders have punished them accordingly.

Google Wave is a prime example of engineers run amok. When it came out, the Wave evangelists blathered on and on about how email was outdated and needed to be replaced. Yeah, how'd that work out for you Wave engineers? I suppose you can now retreat to your cube can claim you were "ahead of your time". That's a lot easier than admitting Wave was a travesty, an overcomplicated mess that no sane person would use. A classic case of "we know what's best for you, not you". Steve Jobs they ain't.

Here's a clue: technology is not a matter of forced innovation. It's a matter of necessity. The reason email is still around? It works. Funny, huh? It serves its purpose, efficiently.

Google has one thing: search. They need to re-focus on that, and if not - the shareholders should punish them relentlessly. These failures are just the tip of the iceberg at Google.

[Art Fewell]

01:03 PM on 11/23/2011

I love google, I studied innovation ecosystems at the IC2 institute and people dont realize that a key cultural reason why the US had been so successful in innovation was because we had a culture that allowed people to fail. Which great inventors did not have more failures than successes, usually by a long shot . People: THIS IS HOW YOU INSTITUTIONALIZE INNOVATION! If you want your business to be sustainable and build a culture of continuous innovation, then take a note from google, this is how you do it. THE IPOD WOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED WITHOUT THE NEWTON! If we as a culture punish google's brand for this behavior, WE ARE HOLDING OUR NATION BACK!

[Carl Hungus III]

02:15 AM on 11/24/2011

I see you have read your Friedman! Well done!