Google Killing Buzz, Code Search, Jaiku, iGoogle Social Features & University Research Program

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It’s a changing product and service landscape at Google. Google is pulling the plug on several of its online services, including Buzz, iGoogle social services, and Jaiku.

At the Official Google Blog, vice president for products Brad Horowitz has announced that the company is shutting down some products. These mostly include social features, but will also include a project with the academe for search data access. Horowitz says that the company is doing this to be able to focus on the products that it feels users really need.

To wit, Google is pulling the plug on the following services:

• Code Search. This product was designed to help developers look for open source code, and will be shut down on January 15, 2012. The code search API will likewise be disabled by that date.
• Google Buzz. Originally launched as Google’s version of a lifestreaming and social networking service, Buzz is quite short-lived, due to the launch of Google’s bigger social networking product: Google+. The Buzz service and Buzz API will be shutting down in a few weeks. Users will still be able to view old Buzz content via their Google Profiles, and these can also be exported through Google Takeout.
• iGoogle social features. Google’s personal homepage product, iGoogle, previously let users interact with other iGoogle users. The company is shutting down this feature, but iGoogle will remain active.
• Jaiku. A social networking service that Google acquired in 2007, Jaiku will likewise shutdown on January 15, 2012. Users can export data with Google Takeout.
• University Research Program. Google has let select academic institutions and researchers gather data from search results through the University Research Program API, but Google is pulling the plug on the service by January 15, 2012.

Some of the products being shut down will be ported as add-on features to other products, such as Buzz, which will be retained under Google+ as an archive of previous lifestreams. Meanwhile, expect Google to trim down its product offerings as it aims to be more focused on building successful products. “To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on,” Horowitz says. Perhaps this is one of the things that Google is doing amid criticisms that it just builds and acquires products without thinking of the underlying platform, as earlier shared by a Google engineer.