With the +1 button in full swing and the Google+ network attracting more than 40 million users at the moment it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google on Friday announced the end of the Google Buzz platform.
On the Official Google Blog Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of product wrote:
“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+,” while he added, “While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.”
Google also announced that they are shutting down Code Search on January 15 and that they will also be shutting down Jaiku, a site they hoped would compete with Twitter.
The end of Google Buzz marks one of the company’s biggest failures to date, launched in February 2010 Google had marketed the program as a threat to Facebook and Twitter however users never took to the service and Google+ eventually trumped the service.
Are you surprised to learn that Google Buzz was so quickly abandoned? I’m not surprised it’s going away considering a quick survey of my friends showed that more than half of them didn’t even know what Google Buzz did.
