As previously announced, Google is ending several services, such as its ambitious collaboration tool Wave, medical records engine Google Health, Twitter competitor Google Buzz, Wikipedia-like aggregate Knol and PC file-searching tool Google Desktop.
This week, the Internet company sent e-mails to communicate its customers the ending of Health and Wave.
The Google Health service will be discontinued as of January 1, 2012. After that date, customers will no longer be able to access it, and 3rd-party services that they have linked to their Google Health profile(s) will no longer be able to send data to or receive data from those profile(s).
As an alternative, Google recommends customers to download or transfer to another online health service. However, for those that do not retrieved Google Health data before January 1, 2012, Google grantees that files will remain available for download for an additional year, through January 1, 2013.
About Google Wave, the company announced that it would no longer be developed as a separate product. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. Customers will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off.
Earlier June, when announcing about the ending of Health and PowerMeter, Google has said that it was retiring these two products because they didn’t catch on the way Google would have hoped. Google PowerMeter was to be retired in September 16, 2011.
In September, Google announced that would be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. This list includes Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip. Google Maps API for Flash, Pack, Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki and Subscribed Links. By that time, the company argueed that “it has never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. And that Google will continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting resources more effectively, so it could focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience”.
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