Google+ has claimed its first victim in the never ending social networking war, but unfortunately for Google it is a home defeat, as the company has announced plans to ditch its poorly pledged Google Buzz initiative that it launched last year.
With Google+ seemingly taking leaps and bounds forward every week, it was time for Google to ditch its Buzz sharing platform and focus on its new baby more.
Back in early 2010 Google announced a new Social networking service for its GoogleMail online mail services. The new features came under the name of Google Buzz, which claimed to add many new social networking features similar to Facebook and Twitter.
Buzz allowed you to post updates on your account in a similar fashion to Facebook and Twitter, but with the exception of having no character limitation to your posts, with Google promising to go “beyond status messages” by allowing the users to also add photos and videos into the status updates too. The difference being that instead of just linking to the Images or Videos on another site, the info was viewable inside of the Buzz page itself.
However, Buzz never really took off, as immediately after its release Google seemed to drop the concept with rumours turning towards a Google inspired social network. Now that supposed Google Social Network would eventually turn into Google+, but we had to wait a pretty long time for it to come.
The news has come from Google’s official blog, where they state that the Buzz functionality will be phased out in the next couple of weeks. Google’s Vice President Bradley Horowitz has also paid a small tribute to Google Buzz by stating “We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”
It’s not exactly a huge upset that Buzz is going, but it does go to show that Google are aware when things are not working and more importantly when to call it a day on a failing project. All we can hope for now is the developers removed from the Buzz setup will add some new features to Google+.
Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.