New Delhi: Google is in the process of killing a number of its initiatives, which have failed to make the impact as the company had hoped. Google is calling it an out-of-season spring cleaning session. The services which the company has planned to shut down include Buzz, Wave, Knol, Friend Connect and others. As per Google's latest offical blog entry, here is a list of services that will be retiring.
1. Google Bookmarks Lists: It is an experimental feature that helps you share bookmarks and collaborate with friends. The company will shut down the service on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labelled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual.
2. Google Friend Connect: This service allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. The service will end on March 1, 2012.
3. Google Gears: The company has announced that on December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download.
4. Google Search timeline: The company has decided to remove this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page.
5. Google Wave: The company had stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and users won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 it will be turned off completely.
6. Knol: Knol will work normally until April 30, 2012, and users will be able to download their knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. But from May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. And after that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
7. Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal: Google has abandoned an ambitious project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal, the latest target of Chief Executive Larry Page's moves to focus the Internet giant on fewer efforts. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level, beleives Google.
Last month, Google had announced that it will shut down Google Buzz. It seems that the company has pulled up their socks to streamline its product offerings across the web.
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