Forget Spring clearouts, Google is making Winter clearouts the next big thing.
The Mountain View Company has announced it will be ending 7 of its experimental software services, including the failed social project Google Wave.
In a post written on its official blog page, Google confirmed that Wave would become read-only and signups would be no more as of January 31st 2012. The company in fact already stopped developing the site over a year ago, but now the site is really being wound down after a poor reception. The site will be completely taken down on April 30th.
“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,” said Urs Holzle, Google’s vice president of operations.
“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” Holzle added.
Out of the 7 products and services Google announced would be shutting down, Wave was by far the best known, and that’s saying something. The remaining 6 are a selection of Google’s experimental projects, most of which never left Google Labs, their beta testing website.
The other six sites and services due to shut down within the next few months are:
- Google Bookmarks List – Allowed Google users to share webpage bookmarks socially
- Google Friends Connect – Add social aspects to your website easily using pre-made pieces of code.
- Google Gears – Allowed users to keep web browser-like functionality even when offline with no web connection.
- Google Search Timeline – With this, users could view a history of their search results in graph form.
- Knol – Google’s attempt at a Wikipedia-like website.
- Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal – A very small side project with which Google aimed to find sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.
Out of these services, Knol will remain online the longest – eventually set to be taken offline next October.
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