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October 17, 2011

Google Shutting Down Buzz, Other Services to Focus on Google+

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

One of the things that make Google (News - Alert) one of the most successful companies in the world is that it is so adept at knowing exactly where to dedicate resources. That is one of the reasons that when Google continues to devote time and energy to programs like Google Maps, but cuts other programs like Google Buzz, people assume the company knows exactly what it is doing. Indeed, Google has decided that it will be shutting down the mini-blogging site as it devotes more time and attention to Google+.



The company has decided that its rival to Facebook (News - Alert) is showing enough potential that it wants to move forward while cutting some of the dead weight. While the company has not announced when exactly Buzz will be closing down, the latest reports had the service shutting down in the “next couple of weeks.” 

For those who enjoyed using the service (and there apparently weren’t many), the company is offering a way to save their posts. Google Takeout will allow people to download their Google Buzz postings to their desktop. This way, if people decide that their posts were of the utmost importance they can put them on another blog.

Google has announced a couple of other services will be shut down on January 15th, 2012. Among the services that will be ending are Code Search and the Code Search API, Jaiku, University Research Program and the iGoogle social features. These particular features will actually be folded into Google+. 

While most of the other services being taken offline by Google were generally geared only towards a very specific group of people, Buzz was supposed to be more popular. Google originally hoped that Buzz would be a main competitor for Twitter (News - Alert), but weak privacy settings turned quite a few users off. 

Google has also pointed out that while new posts will no longer be entered on Google Buzz, they will be still be viewable on the Google profiles. Bradley Horowitz, VP of products at Google, said that, “We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus ... We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.”





Edited by Jennifer Russell
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