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The Google downside to web services

January 15, 2009 8:51pm
by Chris Nuttall

Google NotebookGoogle has been doing some house-cleaning in terms of phasing out services it sees as having limited potential.

Unfortunately, judging by the angry response, it has undermined some of the trust it has built up with users in the process.

Its engineers may also be disillusioned at wasting some of their 20 per cent time on what they felt were exciting concepts that have never been fully realised.

And start-ups, who agreed to sell their innovations and join Google, have a right to feel frustrated at how their potential has been buried, rather than leveraged by Google’s huge audience into mainstream adoption.

I am a user of two of the abandoned services - Jaiku and Google Notebook. Among others being shut down or phased out are Google Video, Catalog Search and Mashup Editor.

At the time Jaiku was acquired in October 2007, it was emerging as the main competitor to the micro-blogging service Twitter. It was European, had some smart people from Nokia developing it and was more fully-featured than Twitter, with location awareness.

I was a little worried at the time that it may suffer the same fate as a similar location service bought by Google - Dodgeball, whose founders had left in frustration at the lack of support for its development. Dodgeball is another service being discontinued in the next couple of months.

Google did say at the time it was working on exciting new products that would use Jaiku, but these have failed to materialise and the fact that it froze membership of the service when it acquired it means that Jaiku has lost irretrievable ground to Twitter in gaining mass acceptance.

Instead, Google is giving away Jaiku’s code to the open source movement to make of it what it will - a charitable gesture, but also an admission of failure.

I use Google Notebook every day while I browse. Right-clicking on a web page, allows me to “Note This”, preserving it as a bookmark, annotating it and even including text and pictures in a kind of scrapbook stored by Google.

Google is stopping development work and is no longer supporting the extension that allows users to add easily to their notebooks. It says it believes it’s taken the right decision for users in the long run.

Notebook had flaws in its organisational processes and it was clear it was not getting a lot of attention from Google’s developers. The same can be said for a number of other Google services, judging by the slow pace of improvements to them.

In contrast, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader are constantly being updated, Google Calendar less so.

This approach breeds uncertainty and distrust in users - if they are going to invest a lot of time in a service, they need some degree of assurance that it is going to be around for a while.

The advantage of web services that they can be constantly improved and updated without the user having to do anything is constantly extolled.

Google’s actions reveal the flip side.

While you have full control and can run for years a desktop application installed on your PC, any web service you subscribe to can be here today, gone tomorrow.

January 15, 2009 8:51pm in Digital media, Internet | Comment

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