Google Buzz, the company’s other social network that was launched last year, and its Twitter clone Jaiku are being axed in its recent project cleanup in order to allow developers to focus on the company’s newest project Google+.
“We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+,” Bradley Horowitz, Vice President for Product, said in a blog post. “Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”
Buzz, and its API, will be shut down in a “few weeks”. Jaiku, however, will shut down in January 15, 2012. That announcement follows 2009’s announcement that it would no longer be actively developing the service and open-sourcing the project to run on Google’s App Engine. It acquired Jaiku in 2007.
Google Buzz, however, had a chequered history. It launched to much fanfare from blogs. However, the product had several privacy problems and no ability to opt-out unless you close your Google account meant that users abandoned the project altogether. The privacy concerns went so far in getting the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate and as a result of a settlement from the case, Google is now subject to privacy audits for the next 20 years.
That could explain why Google+ has much better security measures at launch than Facebook.
Also announced to be shutting down by Google is Code Search and its API (allows users to find open source code across the web), iGoogle’s social features and its University Research Program for Google Search (provides API access to its search results for a small number of academic researchers).