More spring cleaning out of season at Google | Hacker News Reader

More spring cleaning out of season at Google

googleblog.blogspot.com

90 pointsfanfantm26 comments

When I read the headline but before I read the article, I had the gut "Great, what thing is Google killing now that I'm going to miss" reaction.

After reading the article, I can safely say they're making the right decision killing off all these services (Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal) as part of their effort to streamline Google. I'm guessing we're nearing the point where we'll start seeing some random projects coming out again, but until then the more people they're putting towards spdy and WebP the more I'm returning to being a Google fan-boy!

I only wish they could put a few more people working on Go, but not too many, wouldn't want to dilute the amazing talent of the current team :)

I hope that, after the pruning process, some more 'random, rhizomatic' growth is allowed. You can't always tell what's going to be valuable ahead of time. And sometimes interesting connections happen when smart people are allowed to work on important projects.

Google is very much a random, rhizomatic company. For the project I'm working on, we have all sorts of different groups who are working on random bits of functionality (some of which overlap with and duplicate each other) that we need to integrate into one big whole. If anything, I think Google runs the risk of not having enough organization and unity.

Every large organization has departments that overlap and duplicate. The problem is when there is a gap that no one is working on.

I'm probably in the minority, but I'm sad to see Google Wave finally die (at Google, anyhow). Still, I imagine this streamlining is ultimately good for the company and will result in higher quality for Google's remaining products.

One of the coolest things on that list is the "RE<C Initiative" http://www.google.org/rec.html

Some of it's videos have 8 (now 9 I guess) views. I'm confused as it's not a major project and hardly anything to cancel. This must be the most press it's ever had.

Internally at Google it was a lot bigger deal, mostly because of the huge power budget of data centers.

Personally, I'm surprised they killed it. The team was fairly small, and they had made some good progress on various initiatives. Perhaps if they had moved them under the Google Power company [1] it would have made more sense.

[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/google-applies-to-b...

and for anyone wondering what a "Brayton engine" is, this seems to be it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brayton_cycle

Glad to see Google focusing their resources on more critical projects such as Android and Wallet.

It is good to focus. I get that Google can only do this by killing projects that are not working.

The problems that many of these killed initiatives are trying to solve, often have successful solutions being built outside of google. Google Wave, for example. If Google doesn't have the right team working on a project, I wonder if other teams inside Google have chances to take on failed projects before they are killed. Another team might make it work.

It is sad, though, when Google entering the market killed a successful solution built outside of Google. Google Wave, for example.

What did Google Wave kill?

Etherpad and any other web collaborative text editors businesses.

I think 'kill' is a strong term to use. Although the original Etherpad service was terminated some time after aquisition, the source was released in December, 2009 :

https://github.com/ether/pad

Someone should build a website to maintain all the projects Google killed. They might not be suitable to Google but someone else could build on the ideas.

I'm sure it varies by project, but as has been said before when Google kills things, a lot of their projects require the core Google infrastructure (BigTable?) that isn't open sourced so it isn't possible to spin the project out.

I wonder if I'm the only one who thinks that Google could make a lot more money, and have a lot more impact, if they opened up the "core Google infrastructure" for [paid] uses by outsiders than Google AppEngine is ever going to get them.

App engine at this point is pretty much all their infrastucture opened up - you got short/long running processes, big table, blobstore, and map reduce. You don't get c or assembly but you get golang which is pretty close.

Too bad about the bookmark lists, I've found some interesting ones. They were coming up for query-by-a-handful-of-examples (à la google sets and grids), just not very well known.

It makes sense, if you think of how many engineers that saves them and conversely, how much more work they'll be able to get done elsewhere.

This was the first time I'd even heard of Google bookmarks. Which is kind of annoying since for the last 6 months or so, at least once a week, I'd wished that something like that existed (instead of my hilarious google doc full of urls).

So off I go looking for it... not listed under more... or even more. Go google for it (duh), find it... and WHOA blast to the past. Doesn't even have the black bar shoe horned in.

You might like Pinboard ("Social Bookmarking for Introverts"):

http://pinboard.in/

You could also check out Kippt: http://kippt.com

Could this mean there is still hope for Google Code Search? I hope so!

There's an also another thing that nobody seems to be discussing. What is that google is secretly cooking up in the google x lab. Larry and Sergey are ambitious guys, and the fact that they're shedding energy plan and knol, and that sergey isn't focusing much on google+ (the massive facebook threat) but instead on x lab means they've got to be gearing up to drop a serious scifi bomb on the scale of the google car (or bigger).

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