Google Users Say Goodbye to Three Google Products
August 06, 2012
By Brittany Walters-Bearden, TMCnet Contributor
Google (News - Alert) users will be saying goodbye to three of its products: Google Apps for Teams, Google Video for Business and Google Listen.
Director of Engineering Max Ibel made the announcement in the Google blog. The majority of the products they plan on shutting down were developed between 2008 and 2009 and were either deemed not useful or rendered redundant by Google products that have been developed in the interim.
Google Apps for Teams allowed users to collaborate on projects with apps like Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Docs. Originally developed for students, Ibel noted that this product was “not as useful for people as we originally anticipated” and Google Apps for Teams accounts will be converted into personal accounts on September 4, 2012.
For users worried about the conversion, directions on how to make the transition are available on the Google Support website. Available alternatives to the product include: the standard Google Apps product, Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Business.
Google Listen, originally developed to help users find and listen to new podcasts, has become redundant since the launch of Google Play, so they have decided to retire the service and allow users who have subscriptions to download them through Google Reader instead.
Google Video for Business, a video hosting and sharing platform for businesses that shared videos internally, will be shutting down at the same time.
Google also plans on closing a number of their official blogs and communications channels, while maintaining over 150 of its most popular blogs, and has future plans to close iGoogle in 2013. Although they are shutting down a number of products, users can expect nothing less than more innovation from Google; these products will, undoubtedly, be replaced by new products that are more relevant to the 2012 user.
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Edited by Braden Becker