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Google Terminates Six Services
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Jan 18, 2009 09:26 AM
from the hasta-la-vista,-baby dept.
from the hasta-la-vista,-baby dept.
Jonah Bomber writes with this excerpt from Information Week:
"In addition to Google's announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it's discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video. ... Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license."
Related Stories
[+]
How Google Decides To Cancel a Project 75 comments
The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project's popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products.
"Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. 'If you're a product manager, you have to recruit people and their "20 percent time."' ... [Jeff Huber, the company's senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball's vision was too narrow. ... Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It's more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication."
[+]
Developers: JaikuEngine Gets Open Sourced 41 comments
volume4 writes "The switch has been flipped and Jaiku has been moved to App Engine. Google will no longer be developing Jaiku, so the code and the future of Jaiku is in the hands of the open source community. From the Jaiku blog: 'Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.'"
We discussed Google's purchase of Jaiku in 2007, and their subsequent decision to halt development a few months ago.
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Hmm (Score:2)
I've never heard of the other ones, but Google Notebook have come in handy plenty of times.
Sad that Google feel the need to close down these services, I mean... how much man power could it really cost just to keep them running?
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
I was recently looking over Google's AdSense revenues and noticed that they were quite low.
While their own site's earnings have been growing, the earnings of their AdSense publishers has leveled off.
The cut they take from AdSense revenues has also gotten smaller and smaller. I was wondering if Google might abandon AdSense [howtonotma...online.com] all together because of it.
What's probably keeping AdSense alive is the $500 million they keep in the bank because of their net 60 payment terms and because people don't get paid until they reach $100.
Half a billion dollar hit wouldn't look nice.
Seems like they're working on improving the results in that area, but these other services just couldn't be monetized properly.
It's nice though. If Google were to give every service online away for free, it would leave little room for other developers to grab a piece off the (shrinking?) pie.
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Re: (Score:3)
Nonsense? Oh, I get it. People should just dumb down, everywhere, like a new lowest common denominator applied to learning or reading? I have a constructive idea: Why don't you buy a fucking dictionary, and read it, rather than brag about your ignorance in public?
Suggestions for alternative to Google Notebook? (Score:2, Funny)
I know about Evernote (from previous postings here), are there others which are worthwhile?
A pity, as I had wanted to aggregate the exposure of personal info to Google....
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I'm a big fan of Evernote, and so I strongly recommend that you check it out, While it's not identical to Google Notebook, the searching and offline capabilities are really nice. The Evernote folks are supposedly working on a Google Notebook to Evernote migration path.
That said, if you don't like Evernote, I think the closest match to Google Notebook is Zoho Notebook, which is part of the Zoho online suite: http://notebook.zoho.com/ [zoho.com] . It even has a Firefox plugin, although I've never used it.
Also,
Re:Suggestions for alternative to Google Notebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This just highlights one of the negative aspects of using services out there on the net - if it's not running on your physical hardware it can be closed when the company decides it's not profitable to carry on with it. In the case of these services I doubt there's anyone relying on them to do business, but that definitely isn't the case for things that run in the various compute clouds, or small companies migrating to things like Google Docs, GMail or Google Calendar.
I wouldn't run anything business critical on something I couldn't replace very easily.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does that actually apply to any of the services you mentioned? GMail provides POP and IMAP access. Calendar exports to .ics, and syncs with various programs. And with Docs, you can quickly download your files as a ZIP full of HTML files.
Indeed, it would be crazy to use any kind of service (paid or not) for something important and not make your own backups. But Google, at least in recent years, has done a pretty good jo
Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of gmail and those apps, since it's out for domains that actually pay Google for the service - I suppose the risk isn't as severe at all and I would definitely recommend using Google to host school email (not all business for other reasons) as it can save a lot of money and provide much better end user experience.
It's about calculated risk and perspective. The specific google services you mentioned are very low risk of being discontinued. The actual ones being discontinued had good reasons: Google Video was redundant with Google owning youtube. Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo. I don't know enough about the others, but they are not in the same league as gmail, which probably is almost as important to google as is its search in some ways.
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Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Informative)
I would recommend against it, and I would be adamant about it. GMail's service is terrible; every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client). School email can require the same level of reliability and availability as business email, at least at the college level: financial aid notices, graduate school applications, job applications, etc. Being unable to access your email can be a serious problem, and frankly, Google's service has not shown itself to be reliable enough for anything beyond irrelevant personal emails.
There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So far as I can tell, gmail is more reliable than my university's email.
Then again, these are the same guys who destroyed one of my professor's laptops when trying to install Visual Studio Pro.
Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:4, Funny)
In my original post, I should have emphasized that any competent IT staff could keep a mail server up and running.
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Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, when you PAY for the Google Apps service, 99.9% uptime is guaranteed and Gmail isn't 'beta' anymore...
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Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Interesting)
We're doing it for a fraction of that. Probably closer to $30 a year per person. That includes SAN storage, servers (with VMware ESX licenses), some share of our Novell licensing (it's GroupWise on SuSE Linux) a share of the backup cost and the minimal amount of staff time needed to keep it running. $25/month per user would be a massive chunk of our operating budget. Heck, I'd like to have $8.47 per user per month. Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.
Our unplanned outage time approaches 0%, and planned is hours per year (this year, there was a little more - we moved all the mail from a Netware 6.5 cluster setup to virtualized SuSE Linux running on VMware).
I'm not including the cost of Blackberry support. Partially because individual departments pay for them, rather than central IT.
I see numbers like this, and it makes me wonder if 1) companies are just doing dumb, wasteful things or 2) Forrester, Gartner, whoever figure out how to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
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Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:4, Informative)
I gather from Google engineers that this issue is caused by the abuse throttling features of GMail. If there's a botnet hitting Google on your subnet, or if your access patterns seem suspicious (which for me seems to include accessing my account from home, work and phone all by IMAP, but as usual the Googler's couldn't be specific about what triggers it) then they'll block you out until you pass a CAPTCHA.
It's pretty annoying since you can't exactly send spam over IMAP. I guess the underlying service is what does the checking, and it can't tell the difference between SMTP, IMAP, and calls from the Web UI.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. As a Google Notebook user, I found it very fast and easy to access. The cost (in clicks) of getting into a Google doc and organizing said doc after is much higher than with Notebook, plus there was an integrated FF plugin that made it very useful for clipping pages.
While Google's statement is "no new development", I think odds are that it will be shuttered completely within 24 months as other notebook services' (Evernote, Zoho) feature sets
Re: (Score:2)
One interesting solution to this problem is Prophet - an open source distributed hosting solution.
More info here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/07/oscon-day-2-prophet-your-path.html [oreilly.com]
Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't unique to 'services on the net'. Services -anywhere- are subject to this. Nothing has changed.
What you really mean is 'software running on computers you don't control.'
As as someone already pointed out, this is less of a problem for people who are paying for their service, rather than getting them for free.
So what you really mean is 'software that you don't pay for, running on computers you don't control.'
Why is it such a big surprise that it could go away?
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Re: (Score:2)
Sort of. It looks like these are all getting canned because they're not really used. This is a good thing. You don't want to be spending a lot of time and resources on products that are unused, half-baked, and for which there's no realistic plan. There is a lesson here for Redmond.
It seems to
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I just exported the contents of my google notebook to google docs. That oughta do it! :P
Re: (Score:2)
No. It doesn't.
At least the risk is about the same, as normal apps even GPL apps.
The same thing happends with legacy apps, in many ways.
You buy an app, you run it the company who produces the app goes out of business, your hardware upgrade make the software incompatible thus you will need to get a new application from someone else with a 50/50 shot of migrating your data. If if it was an open source app that stopped productions for most people who got this app to save money (sorry that is the real reason w
Obscure services (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the reason why Google became popular was because of its clean front page. Other search engines like Altavista made you load a pile of superfluous stuff when you just wanted to search. But this has come back to bite Google because unless you hunt them out, you'll never know most of Google's services even exist.
Re:Obscure services (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed. And that's a big issue with some of their better services.
For example, initially, I was really panicking as I read this headline, as I tend to rely on some google services a lot. Thankfully, re-reading showed that they're only cancelling "six" services, not their sex services.
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Re: (Score:2)
Have you bothered to look on the upper left side of the Google front page, where those services are clearly linked?
Really, it's all there. Has it gotten to the point where we need huge flashing animated banners with sound for people to find out about services on a website?
Simple links are enough for me, and vastly preferred.
Re:Obscure services (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you look for something you don't even know exists?
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Re:Obscure services (Score:5, Funny)
How do you look for something you don't even know exists?
You google it?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly this is a problem that can be fixed with appropriate AdWords
Alternatives for Google Notebook? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
delicious?
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Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly are you using Google Notebook without using a computer? Unless Google just released a spiral bound version that I'm not aware of?
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I have a few of those. Nice little paper notebooks embossed with the Google logo, given away as promotional items. You can use them anywhere, no computer needed!
But I believe that GraphiteCube was talking about when you're not using your own computer. That is, you're using someone else's, or a public terminal or something. But personally, I'd just send email to myself in that case. Or use my paper Google notebook. :-)
Re:Alternatives for Google Notebook? (Score:5, Informative)
If you have an iPhone, Evernote has an app that accesses your online Evernote database.
I used to use Google notebook, which is still nice, but I've since switched to Evernote. I like Evernote because:
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Lame (Score:2)
Google's biggest problem is they have something like Notebook that has real potential but they put zero effort into it and then it's no surprise it's not very popular.
They should focus on search but they should start trying to build up more of a foothold in other areas because there's no guarantee they'll be the top dog forever.
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If it took no effort, you should write one yourself and capitalize on it.
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That said my point wasn't that it took no effort to create but creating something and them more or less letting it sit there to rot isn't a smart thing to do.
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Re:Lame (Score:4, Informative)
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).
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SaaS (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why Software as a Service is never a good idea. You can have a ton of data stored on that service and it can be discontinued at any time. This is why when I do use Google Docs, I have the data backed up on our own site, and this is also why I won't use Microsoft Live! alternatives to Office.
It is designed to create vendor lock-in. I do not trust the likes of Microsoft to provide a data export option should they decide the service is not working. Thankfully Google has at least up to now been honorable in providing the means to retrieve data even when products have ceased, and provided PLENTY of notice (we knew what, two years ago that Google Video was going to die?) when discontinuation of hosted services were planned.
In light of this. F/OSS and "shared source" solutions you host yourself (or at least have FULL access to not only the data but also the code) is the best solution, and even proprietary/closed-source shrinkwrap software where you have both the software and the data in-house are the best solutions. Even closed-source software with craptivation, er, activation and per-use license verification schemes are vastly superior because should the vendor die, cracking the checks to continue your right of first sale to use the product can still be exercised in the very worst cases.
In this case users are fortunate it's Google services because as stated above Google provides plenty of notice and the means to retrieve data - and in the case of some tools have even have open source so you can continue use of the service in your own hosted environment. Don't expect that to be the case with other SaaS solutions when they are terminated.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe nobody cares about your gaming videos? And maybe it is because of junk like that they are closing it down?
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http://www.wegame.com/ [wegame.com] ?
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I don't know if this is what they had in mind, but...http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/14/2126204 [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know how the web has gotten so centralized.
Its pretty obvious why it got centralized. End users never had the necessary upstream bandwidth, often weren't even allowed to run their own servers, didn't have machines up 24/7, didn't have the knowledge to build their own webpages, didn't want to spend money to rent their own servers, etc. Add to that, that centralized content specific servers provide much better search and user interface then a random collection of pages on the web and it becomes pretty obvious why the web is the way it is today.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Shouldn't you be mad at your school district for blocking youtube instead of google for shutting down a redundant video service?
I just don't see the logic in your rant.
Dear parliboy @ slashdot (Score:2)
Google doesn't care, they've already evaluated the costs, the benefits, done some analysis and then they probably took an afternoon siesta (it is the Google office, after all.) After juggling the proposals and attaching velcro to them and throwing them at walls to see which one sticks the best, they've determined Google Video is of greater cost than it is benefit. Or that envelope had better velcro. Who knows in this crazy messed up world anymore? However, Google still 3 you, and that's why Google Video wil
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Agh, the 3 needs to be <3.
Right to work (Score:3, Insightful)
I teach at a school district where YouTube is blocked.
If you need YouTube to do your job, and your administrators decline to provide YouTube to instructors, are the private schools hiring? That's the beauty of America: you can choose to work for a different organization that provides the appropriate tools.
Re:Its first recession. (Score:5, Informative)
some more interesting reading today Why Google Employees Quit [techcrunch.com]
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