The 10-year-old Yahoo Briefcase service will close: With 30 MB of storage in up to 5 MB chunks, IDG News Service notes, it's a pretty old-school operation.
Briefcase users have until 30-March-2009 to clear out their luggage.
January 2009 Archives
Silicon Alley Insider wonders why Google Knol's still alive: With Google shedding sometimes cheap projects left and right, Eric Krangel wonders why Knol isn't slated for the chopping block. The Wikipedia-ish competitor requires a lot more authority for writing and editing articles, which has limited its scope. It's also not very interesting. Wikipedia may have its problems about many hands watering down the soup, but it also has a remarkable breadth of interest and depth in particular areas.
iGoogle's customized version for iPhone's Mobile Safari is gone: iGoogle is a way to create a set of widgets and other items from Google that display for you on a login page. The iPhone and Android version was better formatted for the WebKit-based browser found in both phones. Now, it's gone. The folks at Download Squad got a tepid answer from a Google product manager, who said they wanted to offer the same (apparently bad) mobile experience to all phone users. Which is a bit silly given that Apple now has a huge share of the smartphone market and the No. 2 competitor, Research in Motion has a crummy browser in its BlackBerrys. Ah, well; easy come, easy go. [Thanks to Matthew Y for the tip!]
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land rounds up Google's slaughter of the services: He writes, Google's changes include "an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor."
As noted earlier in this blog, Google has already shut some services down like Lively (a 3D world with avatars) and JotSpot (which was migrated into Google's wiki service, but with some features dropped, like class reunions).
Sullivan has run down the Google blog entries that detail the changes, so I'm cribbing from his work here, and annotating with my own take.
Google Video: Upload will no longer be allowed in the near future; videos that have been uploaded will remain. The service will be refocused on search instead of sharing. Google bought YouTube for a reason.
Google Catalog: This move has little impact on regular users, because it wasn't a hosted offering. Google Catalog was an effort to turn print catalogs via OCR into online searchable listings.
Google Notebook: The service allowed you to annotate Google search results by linking and creating notes. Google has various offerings that replicate but don't fully replace this offering, which obviously didn't have enough uptake to develop. The service won't stop working for those using it, but no one can newly sign up for Notebook, nor will development proceed.
Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor: Jaiku was a Twitter-like service for creating communication among friends; the project will move to a different platform (Google App Engine), and volunteers will maintain the code, which will be released as open source. Dodgeball was an SMS-based notification service for informing friends of your whereabouts, among other social lubrication. Mashup Editor let you create applications from simple pieces, but it's also migrating to the App Engine architecture for good reason.
Google is getting serious by reducing the number of projects in the works, and teaching people that beta isn't just the second letter in the Greek alphabet.
Jason Scott is pretty angry about the cavalier way in which AOL, among others, is shutting things down: My friend Chris Pepper forward a link to the Slashdot discussion of Scott's article in which he argues that some kind of eviction bill of rights is needed for digitally hosted material.
