Google’s product VP Brad Horowitz blogged on Friday that several services were being culled in the near future. The company would first shed Google Buzz, its troubled social sharing service. Its programming interface should shut down in “a few weeks” and will limit users to reading and downloading whatever they made beforehand.
Buzz never gained much traction and triggered lawsuits through its possible privacy violations, where it auto-friended users without consent.
An acquired Twitter rival, Jaiku, is also closing down as of January 15. Its closure will be more permanent and will only let users export the data they have.
The Buzz and Jaiku decisions are all directly related to Google+. It both provides many of the equivalents as well as more, such as live video chats and streams. It represents Google’s first truly unified social effort and has been far more successful so far, getting 40 million users in just a few months.
