Google announced a fall-spring clean. The technology giant will be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features over the next few months.
Doing this, the corporation that has just celebrated its 13th anniversary, wants to simplify using its services and improve the overall Google experience.
“It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people” says Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President in a post on Google’s blog.
The changes will touch such services as Desktop and Fast Flip. The first will be discontinued on September 14 for the reason of a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search functionality into most modern operating systems. The second, aimed to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices will live in other Google’s delivery tools.
Aardvark, a start-up Google acquired in 2010, will be closing as Google will work on more immersive tools to help people to ask questions and discover the world.
The Google Maps API for Flash, which was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications will continue its existence without the API, but keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and focus on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
Google Pack will be discontinued due to the instantly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps.
Google Web Security new sales will be closed but Google continues to support our existing customers.
Image Labeler, a game of labeling the images on the web will be discontinued, while a variety of online games from Google will be available.
Google Notebook, which allowed users to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish will be closed but all its data will be automatically export to Google Docs.
Sidewiki will be closed while Googlers are looking forward to ‘extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative’ as stated in the post.
Subscribed Links, which enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users will be discontined as well. Developers can access and download their data until September 15.