It’s July, and one of the heavily used Google product, Google Reader, has been laid to rest on 1st of this month. A small sect of the people did try to save this RSS reader, raised even twitter campaigns; but the service however couldn’t be saved.
Google Reader is the recent one to get axe, but there are many other Google products which the search giant has killed or about to kill. Some of these products were admired by the users, some received laughs, and some made the users question Google, “why did you bring this product at all.” Here is the list of 5 Google products as compiled by Android.
#1 Google Reader
The search engine giant launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easier for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. It is a content application used as a platform for serving news and information to people, which is highly popular even now.
The Reader did garner a small but loyal fan base over the time. But, Google wasn’t happy with that. The company stripped the social properties of the product in 2011, and then finally axed it on 1st July.
#2 iGoogle
iGoogle, formerly Google Personalized Homepage, is a customizable Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal. Google originally launched the service in May 2005. Its features include the capability to add web feeds a "Google Personalized Homepage" to "iGoogle". It will be discontinued by November 2013 as the company believes the need for it has 'eroded over time.'
#3 Google Health
Google Health was personal health information centralization by Google introduced in 2008 and cancelled in 2011. The service allowed Google users to volunteer their health records – either manually or by logging into their accounts at partnered health services providers – into the Google Health system, thereby merging potentially separate health records into one centralized Google Health profile. Though the product was killed in 2011, the data was made available till January 1, 2013.
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. It was announced on December 13, 2007, and was opened in beta to the public on July 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field. On January 16, 2009, Google announced that Knol had grown to 100,000 articles, and users from 197 countries visited Knol on an average day. On November 22, 2011, Google announced that Knol was to be phased out in favor of Annotum. It was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012.
#5 Google Talk
Google Talk is an instant messaging service that provides both text and
voice communication. It was integrated in to other Google services like
gmail, Orkut, Google+, and others. However Google replaced the service
with its Google Hangouts on May 15, 2013.
0 comments:
Post a Comment