Google culls underperforming projects

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Jan 2009 at 10:20

Google has unceremoniously axed a number of low-profile projects and a small number of staff, as it tightens its belt ahead of a difficult year.

The company is closing down or severely limiting six projects, most notable of which is Google Video which has been slipping increasingly into irrelevance ever since the company purchased YouTube in 2006.

Since then, the web giant has removed paid videos from the site, and now plans to disable the ability to upload videos. Current content will still be available for the time being, but there's no word on how long Google plans to leave that remnant in peace.

Most interesting of all the announcements, perhaps, is the fate of micro-blogging service Jaiku. Google purchased Jaiku back in 2007, but since then the service has languished in Twitter's shadow and will now be ported to the Google App Engine and open-sourced. Jaiku will remain online for others to develop, but Google has washed its hands of it.

Other projects have not been so lucky. Dodgeball, a service allowing people to share their location over SMS, will be axed in the next couple of months, along with Catalog Search, which was originally built to demonstrate the Optical Character Recognition Technology now being used in Book Search.

Likewise, Google's Mashup Editor will be ditched "in favor of the more powerful App Engine."

Last and least, Google Notebook, which allows people to share web clippings, is to cease accepting new users. Though current users will still be provided for, they won't be able to use the browser extension, significantly reducing its usability.

Google is also reducing its recruitment division by a 100 people, as it looks to a quiet year on the hiring front.

"As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognised that we needed fewer people focused on hiring," the company says.