Google Axes Six More of Its Services

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Friday afternoon, Google announced the future plans for six of its properties: Google Message Continuity (GMC), Sky Map, Needlebase, Picnik, Social Graph API, and Urchin. The company has determined that each of these products is either redundant, underperforming, or incongruent with Google's overall experience. Like the retirement of Google Labs six months ago, some of these projects will be merged with others, some will be open sourced, and some will simply be wound down for good.
 
Our government needs to take a page from Google and start axing useless programs. Google for President!
 
Never heard of most of them...

Thought Needlebase might be some kind of tattoo search engine, or tailor community. Turns out it some web developers something.
Urchin is a web stats thing that lots of sites/hosts do for you anyway.
Picnik seems too similar to Picasa.
Social graph is too creepy.


The only bad one is Sky map. It needs some kind of "HD" remake, as the imagery is kind of...crap looking.
 
Sky Map was the only one I used as well. It was pretty damn cool too.
 
aww man, not sky map :( Ah well.... I'm sure the community will carry the torch.
 
Skymap was pretty cool for all of the 10 glorious minutes needed to see everything you wanted that first time, and then never started it up again.. Still very neat, just pretty useless..

Everything else I had never heard of..
 
Urchin was way cool but far too expensive at 30k+ in comparison to the free Analytics. Pretty sure that Google bought Urchin way back when. Perhaps they will sell it off and someone will buy it and not price themselves out of the market.
 
In a sense, they are becoming like Yahoo circa 2005-08. Buying companies and then just shutting them down eventually. A good bit of those listed were acquisitions.
 
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