Picnic, Google Message Continuity, Needle base, and others are on the chopping block this Tim Google is continuing to weed out its services and today announced it will shut down Picnic, Google Message Continuity, and Needle base and make changes to some other services.
Google acquired Picnic in 2010, saying it would integrate the photo editing service with its own Picasa. "We're retiring the service on April 19, 2012, so the Picnic team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products," Dave Garboard, vice president of product management for Google, wrote in a blog post.
The company is also discontinuing Google Message Continuity, its service for backing up Microsoft Exchange emails. Since launch, "hundreds" of businesses have signed up for the service, but it's clear many more are interested in Google Apps, Garboard wrote. "Going forward, we've decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC," he wrote.
Google will shut down Needle base, a data management platform, on June 1, and the Social Graph API, which isn't being widely used, on April 20.
Google also will stop offering a client-hosted version of Urchin, an online analytics product on which the company built Google Analytics. It will instead focus on the online offering of Google Analytics.
Finally, Google plans to open-source Sky Map, the Android application that uses GPS to show users constellations in the night sky. Through a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, Google hopes to see students use Sky Map for projects, it said.
Last year Google announced the closure of other products and services, including Buzz, Code Search, Jack, Aardvark, Fast Flip, Side wiki, and Image Labeler.
And that, as they say, is that. The theme of these phase-outs, if there is one, is that Google is simply whittling away any service that doesn’t fit into its existing Google Apps-Google+ ecosystem. It’s a bold move, and I think it’s going to result in a stronger core focus for Google’s emerging cloud platforms. But at the same time, cutting functionality is cutting functionality, and this is going to leave some users high and dry.