Picnik, Google Message Continuity, Needlebase, and others are on the chopping block this time!
After a decade of product proliferation Google is pruning its product portfolio. Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management said in his recent blog: “As we head into 2012, we’ve been sticking to some old resolutions – the need to focus on building amazing products that millions of people love to use every day. That means taking a hard look at products that replicate other features, haven’t achieved the promise we had hoped for or can’t be properly integrated into the overall Google experience.”
- Google Message Continuity (GMC): Going forward we’ve decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC.
- Google Sky Map: We will be open-sourcing Sky Map and are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects.
- Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives.
- Picnik: We acquired this online photo editor in 2010. We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. As of now, the premium service is free to everyone. Premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.
- Social Graph API: The API isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and is being deprecated as of today. It will be fully retired on April 20, 2012.
- Urchin: In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics. We’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.
Google is continuing to weed out its services and today announced it will shut down Picnik, Google Message Continuity, and Needlebase and make changes to some other services.
Source: Google blog post
