Google to Shut Down Buzz, Focuses on Google+

Google shuts down its 19 months old social messaging platform Google Buzz to focus on Google+, the company announced in a blog post. Google Buzz was launched in February 2010 and initially could seen as a threat to Twitter and Facebook, but never lived up to its promise, becoming one of the biggest flops of the year.

Google said in a blog post:

“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.”

In addition to Google Buzz Google shuts down few more products too. They are the following:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• Jaiku, a product google acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. Google will be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, google gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With google’s new focus on Google+, google will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to google search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.