Google has announced that they will close some of their offices due to the financial crisis in the world 🙁 and at the same time some services will be closed (or abandoned).
Services they will close:
- Jaiku – Google acquired this micro blogging service in late 2007 and it will be updated to use Google App Engine instead. When that’s Jaiku will be released as open source.
- Google Video – In a couple of months it will no longer be possible to upload videos 🙁 . But who’s using Google Video where you can use YouTube?
- Google Catalog Search – Will be replaced by Google Book Searc.
- Dodgeball – A SMS service Google acquired in May 2005. In a couple of months it will no longer be possible to use it.
- Google Notebook- New users can’t sign up any more, but old will still be able to use it for a couple of months more. Users are encouraged to switch to services like Google Docs and Searchwiki instead.
We can only hope these people are so creative that they can create new services to develop and later sell to Yahoo or Google 😀
/Andreas
i find ‘closing down’ news very saddening. it’s like an evident fact that the economic world is collapsing. though google will not totally shut down, simply removing/closing some of their services means that the generated jobs there will also be closing resulting to more jobless people 🙁
I think we were all under the impression that the Internet might not get hit too hard by the recent economic downturn. With Google being hit it should make us realize that these are hard times for everyone and everywhere, and that no one is really safe from these happenings. Then in today’s news Circuit City has announced that this is it for them. Leaving several thousand people out of jobs, as soon as their inventory is gone. Not good times. 😥