• Mobile service Dodgeball. We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available, Google says. The original founders of this Google-acquired company already left a while ago in frustration due to Google allegedly not evolving their product.
• The Mashup editor, which is still only available in a limited test version. This product, originally released in 2007, was letting you create programs accessing and mixing APIs like the Google Maps API. Google suggests the App Engine would now be the way to go, as far as Google products go. Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months, Google notes.
• Video uploading at Google Video. For quite a while now Google had made acquired YouTube their official video upload site, at least judging by things like where Google uploaded their own content for official blog posts (and judging by how much easier it was to get videos onto YouTube in terms of speed and lack of bugs). Google Video is a meta video search engine these days. Now that change in direction has become more completed and official: In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video, Google writes, adding that existing uploaded content wont be removed, though.
• Google Catalog. This was a bit of a precursor to Google Print, now known as Google Book Search. The scanned and OCRd catalogs of this collection are painfully out of date by now, tough. -W-ere bidding it a fond farewell Google says, stating they want to focus efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.
• Last not least, Google Notebook " while not being directly canceled " wont be worked on anymore. Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means well no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. Google say they will continue offer the service for existing users. The Notebook extension wont be supported anymore, though, Google adds. Google suggests users look into Google Docs, as well as the SearchWiki feature (wow, I never use that anymore... it just ends up cluttering search results).

(Google-acquired activity streamer Jaiku, on the other hand, will be migrated. Google says they are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on.)

Google is acting quick and getting leaner during the recession, and sometimes thats good to focus on whats important. Not doing so, you risk trembling over your own weight, and especially deserted products like Google Catalog wont be missed by many. On the other hand, some of the users of the now canceled products, like the Mashup Editor, may begin to miss their tools, and trust Google less when it comes to future choices of where to put their content. Reto Meier in the comments writes:

The loss of the Mashup Editor is quite a blow to me personally.

Ive got a few sites hosted there, two of which have nearly a thousand daily page views. Its going to be a pain porting them over to the App Engine :(

If all these are signs of a less experimental, more consolidated Google*, then there may be another side effect: potential employees may be less willing to apply for a job. For one thing, a rather free-roaming environment is an attractive job feature for developers. Also, if you were a genius programmer in the mood to create a new product with uncertain future and user base " a product which you believe might take a lot of fighting for it to evolve into something great " would you apply at Google, a company that killed of their exploration of a social 3D world after just little over 5 months? Or would you rather start-up your own little company... including the potential to get acquired by a bigger company, like Google, later on?

-Thanks James!-

*Also see BBC, who talked to Googles Matt Cutts. Matt insisted that the early spirit of freedom and experimentation was still there in the culture. But when I pressed him on whether even Google could afford that luxury in harder times, he admitted that people like him now had perhaps to be a little more focussed on the bottom line. But he said the one day in five spent on personal projects was not being discarded. I wonder if Matts perspective, being as BBC puts it a greybeard in the company (hes there since 2000), is representative for the situation at large?

Del.icio.us

Digg

Reddit

Furl