Google is continuing its house cleaning process by shutting down a number of services, including Aardvark, which it acquired in early 2010. Recently, Google announced it would be shutting down Slide.
Google has put up an official blog post discussing the future of specific products. Some are getting shut down, and others are being integrated into other products. Here’s Google’s plans for each of them:
Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we 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, we’ll 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 will be 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 our 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 we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
Google Pack: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we’ve integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although our previous sales channel will be discontinued, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
Image Labeler: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.
Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll 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, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our 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.
Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we’ll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people’s search results.
Aardvark has resided in Google Labs since Google made the purchase, and in July, Google announced that it was pulling the plug on Google Labs. Little was revealed about just which projects would live on, but the company said at the time, “In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We’ll update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.”
Matt McGee looked at the fate of over half of Google’s Labs Projects in a post earlier this week. Google Correlate has been added to Google Trends and Google sets is shutting down by September 5.
Places Directory is also being phased out. Other products like: Google Shopper, Open Spot, Intersection Explorer, Walky Talky, My Tracks for Android, Google Goggles, Sky Map for Android, Gesture Search, Finance for Android and Google Listen remain available through the Android Market.
Here’s a message from the Aardvark team as posted on the Aardvark blog:
As part of the shutdown of GoogleLabs, Aardvark will be shutting down at the end of September.
Aardvark began as a small experiment in a new kind of social search, and over a few years blossomed into a service that made millions of connections between people to answer each other’s questions. It was a great experience in seeking to combine a broad vision for the future of technology with a rigorous user-centered design process. Over this time, we learned a lot about creating and maintaining online communities, and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people.
We’ve been excited to share these lessons within Google over the past year, especially as part of the effort behindGoogle+. It has been gratifying to see how well this project is doing — even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! — and there is much more to come very soon. In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information.
Of course, we’re also sad to say goodbye to the original Aardvark here at vark.com. Who would have thought that a digital version of a nocturnal burrowing mammal would have engendered so much affection! We’re very grateful to the whole Aardvark community for your support along the way.
Onwards,
Max and Damon
p.s. In the spirit of data liberation, we want to make sure that any of you Aardvark users who would like to retrieve your past data from the service can do so. Right now of course you can log in and manually copy anything you’d like to keep. Or if you prefer, you can email us at [email protected] and we’ll send you a bulk dump of your data (please allow time for us to process these). After September 30, there will be no way to retrieve your data, as shortly after that we will delete everything permanently.
If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s Data Liberation Front, it’s essentially an initiative that lets users of Google products export their data.
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