Dec 01 2008
Google is on a diet!
It seems like the search giant is going through some housekeeping: laying off 3,000 employees and shutting down over ten of its services. We know from our clients that the first thing in slow times is to shut down the advertisement dollars. I guess, easy to setup and easy to stop, all it takes is a click of a button.
Well, we are seeing the result. Here is a shortlist of the services that Google just stopped offering:
1. Lively - used to be a virtual world kind of like second life. No more.
2. Google Answers - similar to Yahoo Answers. No mas.
3. SearchMash - non Google branded experimental search for design purposes. Gone with the dinosaurs.
4. Page Creator - a simple way to create a simpleton website. Caput.
5. GDrive - allow online storage on Google servers. Negative.
6. Browser Sync - extension for FireFox to synch your browser settings across computers. Belly up.
7. Hello - online photo sharing integrated with Picasa. Dead.
8. SMS - send SMS to a phone from online. Departed.
9. Click to call - was used inside Google Maps. Extinct.
10. Send to phone extension - FireFox extension. Vanished.
11. Related Links - relating links between sites. Defunct.
Now, this is not to say that Google is no longer the search giant. I only suspect that this is a focus shift and we will eventually see many more useful tools and systems come out of Mountain View, CA. Google is still one of the biggest think tanks in the world and did I mention the largest cloud computing network?
