If Google was some digitized version of Wipeout!, inevitably some of the products won’t get to move on and compete in the next round. It’s a fact of life: there has to be losers. For at least a few of those products, the judge’s scores have been added and today Google will be sending them home with a sad collection of consolation prizes.
Actually, they don’t even get that much; Google’s just pulling the plugs on these misfit products and sending them to the big Google server in the sky. Some of these products are just redundancies of more popular products while others simply never caught on with users.
The first product to go meet the butcher is Google Talk Chatback. Since Google purchased Meebo, it’s turning off Chatback and encouraging people to migrate over to the Meebo bar if they want to provided some kind of embedded chat among visitors.
Although Google didn’t specify a date, it will “soon” be retiring the Symbian Search App. There’s no replacement for this one, unless you want to be imaginative and consider google.com as an alternative.
Later this month on July 31, Google will be closing down Google Mini. If you’re going to miss this service, Google recommends trying out Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search for your enterprise needs.
Google Video, which hasn’t been accepting uploads since May 2009, will finally be absorbed into YouTube. All of the hosted content on Google Video will be moved to YouTube and automatically marked as private videos on August 20. However, if you’ve still got content on Google Video, you can manually move your videos to YouTube before that date. Once your videos are moved, you’ll be able to access them via YouTube Video Manager.
Finally, iGoogle, Google’s attempt at allowing users to create a personal homepage replete with widgets and other quick access to Google apps, will be climbing the scaffold… eventually. For some reason, Google is waiting until November 1, 2013 – that’s not even this November! – to close down iGoogle. The first part of this closure, though, is that Google will no longer accept theme submissions and new gadgets past July 31, 2012, so if you want to hurry up and develop some new product for a web service that’s admittedly on life support, you better get right to it. In the meantime, developers will still be able to update existing gadgets after this month.
Meanwhile, the rest of Google’s quadzillion products will remain in service.
[Via Google’s Official Blog.]