Google kills off seven more products including Wave

The out-of-season "spring clean" brings an end to services including Google Wave, Knol and Google Gears.
 
It is the third time that the US firm has announced a cull of several of its products at the same time after they had failed to take off.
 
Experts said the strategy might put off users from signing up to new services.
 
Google announced the move in its official blog.
 
"We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward," said Urs Holzle, Google’s vice president of operations.
 
"Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience," he added.
 
Wave goodbye
 
The seven latest products earmarked for the chop are as follows:
 

Google Wave – an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration
Google Bookmarks List – a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends
Google Friends Connect – allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code
Google Gears – much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline
Google Search Timeline – a graph of historical query results
Knol – a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal – a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power

Google had previously announced its plans to kill off some of the projects on the list.
 
It has now given details about when the switch-offs will occur. For example Wave will be retired in April, and Knol content will be taken offline in October.