Google Kills 10 Products

Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience...

Here’s a quick overview of where a number of products and features are headed: 

• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.


• Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.


• Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.


• Google Pack, Notebook, Sidewiki [and 4 more...]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html

Pretty Crazy. I occasionally used Aardvark if I needed a quick answer to a question. What other service emails people questions and send back answers so quickly? I would've thought Google would have tried to incorporate it more into Google+ to compete with Facebook Answers. FastFlip was also an interesting way to browse news, though I don't know if it was actually that useful. And Google  Desktop was a good way to search one's computer, though Windows has improved greatly on that front. I don't think they'll actually be able to get everyone to move to the cloud that quickly, but I guess they want to stay focused.