Google to shut down Google Buzz

New York  : The search giant, Google announced to shut down the highly controversial social networking product, Google Buzz and Buzz API, Google Code Search, Jaiku along with several other services.

Google had announced in September that they are conducting fall spring-clean in the coming months by either shutting down a number of Google products and services or merging them with the other products as ‘features’. Among the names of the services that were closed are Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeller, Notebook, Sidewiki, Subscribed Links and of course, Google Labs.

Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Google Product said in the blog post, “Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.  Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”

Its API will also be shut down and people will no longer be able to create new posts after that.However, he said people will still be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile and download it using Google Takeout.

Also to be shut down are the social features on iGoogle, a personalized page for users with Google accounts.

“With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are,” Horowitz said.

Other products to be shut down include:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web. It will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.

• Jaiku, a product acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends. It will be  shut down on January 15, 2012. Google is working to let users export their data from Jaiku.

• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to Google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers. It will close on January 15, 2012.