Google's Projecide

Google is planning to kill off a bunch of its products, some of which really don't deserve to die. Here's what's currently on the platter:

Code Search
Not many people might have used it, but it was a good idea! Maybe instead of killing it, they should've expanded it to search GitHub and SourceForge?

Google Buzz
Well, they starved it to death, so might as well put it out of its misery. But at least integrate it into the Google+ Stream instead of just smacking it into a separate tab on Profile, which no one will ever see.

Buzz was also a good idea, but it was a knee-jerk response to Twitter, one that never answered the question: “Why would anyone use this instead of Twitter?” To make things worse, they buried it in the GMail app, so it was promptly forgotten.

Jaiku
Whatever, who cares.

iGoogle Social Features
See Jaiku.

University Research Program for Google Search
Sounds cool, but based on their description, it was only available to “a small number of approved academic researchers,” so since it was never available to me, I'm going to go ahead and put it into the Jaiku pile.

Google Labs
This is the real mockingbird of the flock. Why shut down something that lets you field test new features? Many of Google's flagship products graduated from Google Labs, including Google Maps and Google Desktop. This makes no sense at all.

According to the same post from their official blog, Google has “learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.” I guess the lesson they learned is to release a product and do nothing to improve it, silently watching it wither and die. Because that's exactly what they're doing to Google+.