Google To Axe Services & Reduce The Number Of Blogs
The search giant Google and its services extend over vast areas of the internet. This invariably brings many challenges such as maintaining every service constantly and prioritizing one service over the other. Naturally, some services are more popular and are utilized by consumers more often and thus need more overseeing and development. At the same time, those services or products which are unnecessary need to be weeded out to conserve resources. Google is doing just that by announcing that it plans to pull the plug off some of its services and stop a certain number of its blogs.
Google currently has more than 150 blogs that it uses to make various announcements across its services and about its products. Google has decided to retain only the more popular and frequently used blogs and stop the rest. “This doesn’t mean that we’ll be sharing any less information—we’ll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels.”, it has said in Google’s Official Blog.
The other products facing the axe, as announced in Google Official Blog are:
Google Apps for Teams: Introduced back in 2008, it was originally meant for teams use, such as small businesses and schools with official email addresses to collaborate over non email applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Having found that this service is not being used as much as Google expected, starting from September 4, 2012, Google Apps for Teams accounts will be converted to Google personal accounts, after which Google Apps for Teams will be completely shutdown.
Google Listen: This is a podcast service, started in 2009 but since the introduction of Google+, the medium of information and podcasts has shifted from Listen to Google+. Hence, Listen has already been stopped. However, those who already have the Listen app installed can continue using it but search function will stop working after November 1. Subscriptions will still be accessible from Google Reader from the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and can be downloaded.
Google Video for Business: This video hosting and sharing service, originally introduced for Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education account holders, will be discontinued starting this fall and all the existing videos will be transferred to their Google Drive accounts. “All migrated videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota”
Apart from the products mentioned in the official blog, Google has also discontinued the social search engine Aardvark, Google Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Notebook, Sidewiki, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security and even plans to discontinue iGoogle by November 1, 2013.
Category: Tech News
