More Wood, Even Fewer Arrows

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[/frame]Remember a couple months ago I had mentioned that Google had plans to shut down Google Labs, and a series of other services in an effort to make Google sleeker and more focused?  Well the time has come. As of last night Google Labs is officially no more. Heading over to http://www.googlelabs.com now simply redirects you back to the Google homepage.

Here’s the latest updates on what’s been happening:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks Google will shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product Google acquired in 2007 that lets users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. Google plans to be working on enabling users to export their data from within Jaiku.
• Several years ago, Google introduced the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With the release of Google+ however Google will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to Google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up Google 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, Google’s teams will 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 has been 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 Google’s other display and delivery tools.
• Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although they are deprecating the API, they vow to keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and will focus their attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
• Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then they’ve integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although they will discontinue new sales of Google Web Security, they will continue to support any existing customers.
• Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. Google will be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
• Sidewiki: Over the past few years, they engineers at Google have seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So they’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.