Google have announced the closure of a few little-used products in their “off-season spring clean”.

• Google Wave – an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration.
  I didn’t use it. Just like everyone else.

• Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends.
  For cloud-based bookmarks I still use and enjoy Delicious (via the trusty Firefox plugin). This may be useful if the likes of Delicious is shut down, as was threatened by Yahoo! recently, thankfully it hasn’t got to that.

• Google Friends Connect – allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code.
  Personally, I haven’t heard of this and won’t miss it.

• Google Gears – much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline.
  It was a nice idea but who uses the web offline these days anyway?

• Google Search Timeline – a graph of historical query results.

I find this very irritating and will be glad to see it go.

• Knol – a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content.
  Completely new to me, clearly difficult to compete with Wikipedia at this stage.

• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal – a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power.
  One of a great number of research projects Google is working on; they say there are “other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level” and have published their results.

This is all just a part of what Google seems to enjoy doing, starting projects and shutting them down when they don’t work. No harm in that really.
More info on the Google Blog.

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