Google stops Beta services
Google stops Beta services
Google said it is discontinuing the products as part of the closure announced last month of its experimental test bed Google Labs. Google is abolishing online news reader Fast Flip, social search service Aardvark, commenting tool Sidewiki and several other products.
“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features,” Senior Vice President Alan Eustace said. Eustace said the closures will allow the Mountain View, California-based company to “devote more resources to high impact products, the ones that improve the lives of billions of people.”
Besides Fast Flip, Aardvark and Sidewiki, other products facing the scissors include Google Desktop, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook and Subscribed Links.
Sidewiki allows notes and comments to be posted alongside Web pages for others to read. Fast Flip allows users to browse through news stories from Google’s media partners at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page.
Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz said in a blog post entitled “Goodbye Aardvark” that the service will shut down at the end of this month. Aardvark uses the contacts in a person’s network to provide answers to questions via the Web at Vark.com, instant messaging, e-mail or Twitter. “Aardvark began as a small experiment in a new kind of social search and over a few years blossomed into a service that made millions of connections between people to answer each other’s questions,” Ventilla and Horowitz said.
No comments:
Post a Comment