Google kills off seven services including 'Wave'

• by: Chris Griffith
• From: The Australian
• November 28, 2011 7:25AM

GOOGLE has announced it will kill its much hyped Google Wave real time messaging platform on April 30 next year, and six other projects.

Google Wave combined instant messaging and email and was designed to allow multiple users to collaborate on projects in real time.

Despite its technical sophistication, Google Wave failed to become popular, and there are many blogs speculating as to why: its complexity is cited as one of the main reasons.

In an email sent to Wave users, Google said as of January 31, all "waves" would be read-only.

“As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012,” Google said in the email.

“You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.”

Google in its blog says it is closing down seven services overall.

“We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward.”

The other services to shut down are:

•Google Bookmarks Lists: an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends. It will end on December 19.

•Google Friend Connect: a service that allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding snippets of code. The service will end for non-blogger sites on March 1 next year;

•Google Gears: it allowed the creating of offline web applications. Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers on December 1.

•Google Search Timeline: a graph of historical results for a query.

•Knol: it allowed experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. Instead, Google said it had been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.

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“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience.,” Google said in the blog.