Alternatives to Google products being shut down.
In a bid to focus on its star and more popular products like Search, Picasa photo editing tool, Web Mail etc, Google has decided to bring curtains down over six of its not so popular products.
The first of the products is Google Video. This product has long played second fiddle to YouTube. And once Video sharing application YouTube was bought over by Google, the inklings were in air. Google video users have the option of switching over to YouTube without any hassles.
Google Catalog search was used to search catalogs on line. It remained an experimental service to help Google in adopting Optical Character Recognition technology for scanning and digitizing the books so that they can be searched on line.
Dodgeball, was a social software service for mobile phones and Zaiku was a rival to microblogger Twitter and Pownce. But the way Twitter has come in to prominence and has grown exponentially, it was always felt that other microblogging platforms will either consolidate or shall go in to oblivion. Pownce was closed last month and with Zaiku also out of the way, its clean and unrivaled road for Twitter now. Google may have plans to take over Twitter in near future.
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Google Notebook, was probably the most popular application out of the six who has been put on chopping block. But Google Notebook users have many options to migrate to. Google docs and EverNote are the two manual options while Grease Monkey script lets you download all notebook pages in one go either as HTML or ATOM/RSS feeds.
Those using Google Mashup can take help of Google App Engine infrastructure to put their own statistics over Google Map and do much more.
Google now has six products less in its basket to work on. With more focused approach and concerted marketing Google can definitely grow places.
May also like to read: Google Products Retirement List.
microblogging is nice but it also limits how much you can say about your daily activities:~:
thanks for the good summary.
Are those 6 poducts the only ones being shut down?
Thanks again.