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.
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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.
Google gives up on JotSpot's servers, but not all customers: Google ostensibly bought JotSpot for its advanced, easy-to-use, template-based wiki hosting. Apparently, the uniqueness of JotSpot was too much for the company, which is offering free migration of most sites into Google Sites--with reduced functionality, of course. No scripts, forms, plug-ins, or page-specific permission. Just...fabulous.
JotSpot's servers will be shut down on 15-January-2009. Migrate before then.
Google has a migration form, but notes that you have to create a Google Sites site first that's empty, and then migrate your JotSpot wiki into it. But Google is also offering export options to preserve as much as one might to take a site elsewhere. Given that most wikis are highly particular, it's possible this is very little comfort. Still, I'll take it.
Those who devoted time and effort to building JotSpot Family Site or Class Reunion Site pages are simply out of luck. There's no migration option and little suggestion about any help.
JotSpot abandoning these two categories entirely just shows how risky it can be to use tools that are site-specific: so much metadata, so much uploading, so much content creation is simply lost when companies lose interest or shrink their businesses.
