"Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t."As part of a "fall spring-cleaning", Google will be closing down and merging some of their older services in the next few weeks. Some of the services with discontinued support will also be gone forever. Here's the full list:
Apps getting discontinued
- Aardvark
- Google Desktop
- Fast Flip (unclear whether it will be removed from News)
- Google Maps API for Flash (with continued support for Premier customers)
- Google Pack (with links available to official download pages of the apps)
- Google Web Security (with support for existing customers)
- Image Labeler
- Notebook (already discontinued product with no support; notebooks will be imported into Docs)
- Sidewiki (part of Google Toolbar)
- Subscribed Links (in Google Search)
You may have as well never heard of many of the above apps before. They were not major parts of the company's suite of online services. Google says that many of these services and the tech behind them will be integrated into other major services. Some of them are already integrated.
"This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people."[via Official Google Blog]
I personally was a user of the less-known Subscribed Links feature (which will stop appearing in searches from September 15), which showed results from Merriam-Webster for words directly into Google search for me. Did you use any of the above services? Will you miss any of them? Hit the comments. You can even post anonymously!
