Google Carves Seven Services Like a Turkey, Wave Included

Posted 11/24/2011 at 8:41am | by Paul Lilly

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While many people were getting ready to stuff their faces with turkey and watch the Detroit Lions not suck for once on Thanksgiving (or just Thursday), Google's been busy doing some off-season spring cleaning. Again. This time, Google zeroed in on seven services it plans to shutter in the near future, including Google Wave, which will soon become a read-only service.

"We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones," Google said in a blog post. "On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround."

Half a dozen other services are also being shut down. They include:

• Google Bookmarks List
• Google Friend Connect
• Google Gears
• Google Search Timeline
• Knol
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C)

Google said the spring cleaning effort is part of its overall goal to "buid a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience."