Google Shuts A Bunch Of Unsuccessful Projects

[HunkyLuke]

Google announced that its shutting the doors on a number of their unsuccessful projects, including:

Google Wave: On Jan 31, 2012, it becomes read-only.

Knol: will be shut on April 30. You can download & export your Knol content until October 1, 2012

Google Bookmarks Lists: ends on December 19. Bookmarks within the lists will be retained and labeled.

Google Friend Connect: ends on March 1. Google wants people to use Google+ instead.

Google Gears-based Calendars and Gmail will no longer be supported at the beginning of December, and then later in December, Gears will no longer be available for download.

The Google Search Timeline is also ending soon, users can still search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page.

And finally, Google has killed its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project. They have published results to date and will continue to invest in renewable energy.

[Bec]

Gmail will no longer be supported at the beginning of December

Aren't their like billions of gmail addys? What are they wanting everyone to use instead?

[conran]

I think they're echoing the old Facebook statement of "email is dead" and hoping people will migrate to their social network instead.
I don't actually use a lot of their services, only analytics and webmaster tools. I do collaborate with a few clients through docs though.
The Google+ thing seems like a complete waste of time (slowing down page load for no appreciable benefit) and everything else seems so disjointed and scattered as though it was only half thought through.

They're good at thinking up new ideas, it's just their implementation and lack of user-friendly layout that bothers me. They tend to offer everything as though the entire public are webmasters, and then you have a maze of options and pages to go through. They don't seem to explain things very clearly, and if I don't have the time to sit down and spend an afternoon looking into it I don't think the average user out there will have a clue either.

[HunkyLuke]

They are killing off their Gears service for accessing calendar and gmail (not gmail itself). From gears.google.com:

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Desktop - Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Database - Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
WorkerPool - Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

[tag]

i never even know about so many of these things ??

[AJ Hall]

i never even know about so many of these things ??

Same here. I feel like Google is always pushing so many new things of which so few catch on that I usually just ignore the announcements. Their approach seems to be to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

[attis]

I wish they would spend more time and money getting their original business - Web Search - right. Still finding tons of top-listed search results from 5 and more years ago when I search for Win7 related computer questions. But it's probably me not asking the question correctly...