TechiePost

Because numerous products did not have the impact the company hoped for, Google has decided to shut down a number of products and features in the coming months, said a Senior Vice President on Official Google Blog.


The products that will be shut down include Google Friends Connect - to be shut down on March 1, 2012, Google Gears - to be shut down on December 1, 2012, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave (here's our recent post on this matter), Google Knol - moving to WordPress.com and will stop working on April 30, 2012 and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) project because there are institutions in better position than Google to take the research to the next level.

While Google did not show a statistics of how many people were using these services, it appears you have to visualize on your mind whether a service -- launched by Google -- has potential to create the impact it hopes for. Because if it doesn't, chances are the search giant will kill it and all your effort may just go in vain (think about Google Friends Connect on non-Blogger sites).

Google has just announced the date of shutting down the user activity of its once much anticipated collaborating service, Google Wave. The company nearly a year ago stated that it would stop developing that project although users would continue to enjoy the service until it's closed down.

Google, in an email to all Wave users, stated that all the existing Wave will be read-only from January 31, 2012. However, people will still be able to export Waves as PDF using its PDF export feature. Google has not strictly said when the service will go completely offline. But from the signs of the message, it's easy to guess that the service may be turned off soon after April 30, 2012.

You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

As an alternative to Google Wave, the email contained two external websites for interested people to try out. Apache Wave and Walkaround are the ones that made it into Google's mass email. Walkaround could be a better choice for people who like to collaborate using service like Google Wave because it has an import from Google Wave feature so you lose nothing if you were into Wave.

Every time you see a 'share-worthy' tweet on your timeline, what do you do? Yes, you hit the retweet button twice. First to actually retweet, and second time to confirm that you'll retweet. You'll what?

Retweet is a common word used in Twitter. In 2008, twitter users used "RT @username" method to share a tweet with their followers. However, that technically didn't do anything. That RT in the beginning meant that it was a retweet and the @ followed by twitter username meant that it was a reply. In 2009, twitter officially rolled out the retweet option which is now an independent feature on Twitter.

Not only that, the word is used so often across twitter and across the web that it made into the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Along with 'retweet', 'sexting' is another word that made its place there.

It's not Facebook's official announcement, but when Facebook's marketing director says so, we feel tempted to say it's said by Facebook.

Randi Zuckerberg's photo from her Facebook album [facebook.com/randi].

Named Randi Zuckerberg, the youngest billionaire's sister and Marketing Director of Facebook argues that anonymity online has to go away in order to stop cyberbullying. She says people put anonymity as their identity to talk and behave like being behind closed door. People behave much better when they use their real name.

Marie Claire magazine hosted a panel discussion on social media this Tuesday evening where Randi Zuckerberg said her thoughts on cyberbullying.