It’s true, technology has changed living style of people and we are promenading to accept more advanced, reliable and innovative technologies. In September 2011, Google started a campaign “A Fall Spring Clean” to purge its services by retiring relatively obscured products and services including Aardvark, Fast Flip and Google Pack. The company has chopped off more than 30 products since last fall.
This time, Google is again trying to clean out its services by chopping off five more services. The search engine giants has announced to phasing out iGoogle, Google Video, Symbian Search App, Google Mini and Google talk Chatback because these services are either redundant or have got disapproval globally by user base.
iGoogle was introduced in 2005 in order to put personalized and real time information at the fingertips of users. The search engine giant has reportedly stated that the service will be no longer after November 1, 2013. However, iGoogle users could access and retrieve the data for 16 months.
Google Video service is considered as superfluous since October 2006 (when Google acquired YouTube). However, it stopped taking uploads since May 2009, and it’s now officially migrated all users’ content to YouTube. Google has given opportunities to ‘Google Video’ users to delete, download, or migrate their video contents until August 20.
But what one should say about the Symbian Search App? It’s true that the Symbian OS had once a very good time, but now, Nokia has switched from Symbian to Microsoft’s Windows platform for Smartphone development in the last year. That’s why, it’s not astounding me anyhow why Google has decided to drop the service.
Google Talk Chatback allows websites to embed a Google Talk widget so they could chat with their visitors. Google wants sites to use its recently acquired Meebo bar and its talk Chatback seems outdated this time.
Google Mini was introduced in 2005 and it’s important part of Google’s Enterprise search. However, it’s performing well this time, despite, Google is going to discontinue the service July 31 onwards. The reason is here that Google Search Appliance, Google site Search and Google Commerce Search are better in functionality than Google Mini.
This year, Google continues its campaign naming ‘Spring Cleaning in Summer’ to pushing out obscure products. Indeed, Google is trying to provide more competitive products and services and for pursuing it requires to retire some of these services and products.
