“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+,” says Google VP, Product Bradley Horowtiz in a blog post. “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.”

“Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past,” he says. “We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”

The other services Google is shutting down include: Code Search, Jaiku, iGoogle’s social features and the University Research Program for Google Search. These will all be shut down on January 15.

iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle apps will stay the same.

Google is also officially closing the Google Labs site today, as previously announced. Boutiques.com and Like.com will be replaced by Google Product Search, also as previously announced.

Will you miss any of the products Google is shutting down? Let us know in the comments.

Searching with Collecta, you get real-time results from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, social sites and various news outlets.

Collecta’s homepage gives the following description of the new search engine…

"Collecta is not like other search engines.
The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of popular realtime blogs and sites like Twitter, WordPress, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try."

What do you think of Collecta’s real-time search? Tell us.

Collecta’s UI is very simplistic and easy on the eye. No frills, just search. Upon doing a search, your term shows on the left (with options), results appear in the middle and selected/highlighted content appears on the right. (click the image below for full size view)

With each search users have to option to include/exclude certain search parameters such as Stories (blog posts, articles), Comments (on blog posts), Updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica), and Photos (Flickr). Collecta even has an option to pause a search stream (not really sure why).

Under the hood Collecta uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) technology, which allows Collecta to keep tabs on information as it happens.

Collecta, so far, has had a very so-so launch day. The search engine was down for quite some time, leaving the company having to explain themselves via Twitter to potential searchers.

I guess they could argue that the demand for real-time search was so great their servers couldn’t handle the traffic.

It’s no secret that search is evolving, and real-time search is the future. Google’s own Larry Page has even said, "I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search".

Twitter, for example, already employs real-time search… and it works wonderfully. I often find myself using Twitter’s search over Google, just for the real-time aspect.

So, with the launch of Collecta… when do some of the major players jump on the real-time bandwagon? Let us know what you think.

- Uploading to Google Video
– Google Notebook
– Jaiku
– Google Catalog Search
– Mashup Editor
– Dodgeball

Now, some notes on each.

The Google Video Team is now encouraging users to upload their videos to either YouTube or Picasa, both of which are owned by Google of course. Uploading will still be available for a few months. They won’t be removing any content that is already there.

The Google Notebook team is encouraging users to try other Google Products with notebook-like functionality like SearchWiki,Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail, and Google Bookmarks. And they claim to have plenty of new ideas for these services.

Jaiku is shutting down before it ever really got going. It is a Twitter-like service that never left invite-only status. According to Read Write Web, "Google will release the Jaiku code under the open source Apache license, so that other organizations can pick up where the Google team left off. It is not clear if current users will be able to transfer their accounts."

Google Catalog Search just wasn’t popular enough to keep around, but the Book Search Team leaves it behind with fond memories. "Catalogs helped us better understand and refine the technology we use today to scan and make the full text of books available online," says Product Manager Punit Soni. "We also learned more about how users read scanned documents online, and how to best present this type of information to them."

Mashup Editor is another one that never really got off the ground. It is still only available in limited testing. Google encourages users to instead use the Google App Engine.

Dodgeball is a mobile social networking service. It will be shut down in the next couple months. Google says they will communicate the exact timeframe shortly.

A post on the Official Google Blog talks about the company consolidating some engineering offices, by shutting down Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden locations, though they say they intend to keep as many of the employees as possible, and just have them move to other locations.

"Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core," says Google Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research Alan Eustace.

Google also announced that they are trimming some recruiting jobs – about 100 of them. "Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions," says Google’s Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

Big changes through Google’s organization today indeed. As far as the services being shut down, I can’t say that I will particularly miss any of them, as I haven’t thrown them much use anyway. Will you miss any of these services?

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Where do Google services go when they, well, go away? Andy Beal suggested services like Jaiku fall into the cushions of a “Google Sofa,” never to be seen again.

Beal cited his experience with Jaiku, post-Google acquisition. He had signed up with Jaiku before that, and returned after the Google news to update his social media feeds.

“Ten hours later, my Jaiku feed still hadn

So let’s talk in Part II about how social media can make you be productive. That can be a book in and of itself, so I’ll just hit some highlights to give you the sense that all these dumb little tools have a pretty positive flipside.

Twitter as productivity tool

People seem to struggle the most with wrapping their arms around Twitter, Jaiku and microblogging generally. My wife giggles just a little bit every time I saw Twitter.  And yes, there are a lot folks who feel inclined to let us know every little nuance of their life.  But Twitter serves two purposes for me, one social, one productive.

1. While an individual tweet may not tell you much, the collection of them can give you snippets into someone’s life that you’re not likely to otherwise get. So there’s social value here.
2. From a productivity standpoint, I find the my Twitter network is better than my blog reader. If something significant is happening, people are Tweeting about it.  I’ve learned about new time-saving tools, like Trip-It over Twitter.  I’ve heard about breaking news, and I’ve found some of my best reads on topics I care about that way. Here’s how Twitter helped in a disaster. It really works. 

Blogs as productivity tool

The average blog has one reader, or so I’m told (I’d heard earlier it was about 7).  Professional journalists like that one seem to be threatened by the blogosphere, perhaps for good reason.  Given that Technorati tracks 112.5 million blogs right now, it’s a mathematical certainty that most are either crap, or niche.  I have two blogs designed for family members online. In fact, they’re locked down. 

Here’s the great thing: Who cares?  Google, Technorati and other search engines have it set up so that these irrelevant blogs are, well, irrelevant. They are unlikely to show up in many search results, be cited by a journalist, or change anyone’s life.  But if you’re buying a new cell phone and not checking enGadget, you’re nuts.  Blogs are just websites, people, and like all types of websites, they vary in value. 

Finally, there are not enough corporate interests out there to crank out all the niche information people are searching for, and blogs do that.  Blogs are one of the main reasons that you can find pretty much anything on Google.  If you don’t get that, well, I can’t help you.

Social bookmarking/news aggregation sites as productivity tool

A lot of folks I talked to don’t understand how Digg, del.icio.us, NewsVine and other sites can be used as productivity tools, either.  (While del.icio.us is a handy way to keep your bookmarks with you from one machine to another, we’ll talk about it from a social networking standpoint here.) 

The obvious first answer is that these tools are filtering mechanisms.  If we know that there’s tons of crap out there (see blog section), then we can benefit if real human beings will point out the stories that aren’t crap.  If enough folks agree about a particular story, it bubbles up to the top and gets passed around. That’s good.

But you can also do social networking stuff with these. Jonathan Colman of the Nature Conservancy (who I had the pleasure to share time with on a recent panel) has built a reputation on Digg (with 585 friends and 1,041 fans).  If you want to know the latest news on conservation and the environment, why do all the work yourself? Jonathan’s already reading all this stuff. Let him tell you the good stuff. 

Similarly, when I wanted to learn more about AP writer Michael Liedtke for a client, I found he (or someone) bookmarked all his articles on Newsvine. Tremendous time saver for me, and good online portfolio for him. 

Summary

I could go on for days (because there’s a lot I left out), and hope others will round this out in the comments section. If you think social media is dumb, a waste of time, or a bunch of amateurs, please know this: Sometimes you’re right.  Often you’re wrong.  Social media is a powerful thing.  That’s why so many people are using it that it’s no longer just the early adopters. 

For any technology to jump the chasm from early adopters to early majority means that it is solving a problem in a way that is superior to what it is replacing.  Crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds and the democratization of content creation means that we’re going to get some junk created.  But it also means we’re getting some really powerful content.  I hope you’ll take some time to figure out the difference.

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Microblogging: What Is It Good For?

If you know and/or follow Lynnette Young, a.k.a. LynetteRadio on Twitter, you would be interested in knowing that she’s on the brink of labor, very near to producing a Halloween baby. You’d also be aware that her husband is in New York sans cell phone.

What use is that to the business-minded? At this point, not much. Later, though, as media converges – especially social media – one might imagine contextual advertising for diapers and baby wipes appearing next to the appropriate tweets. (The 140 character or less posts are called "tweets" on Twitter.)

Perhaps that’s what Google plans to do with recently acquired Jaiku, a platform similar to Twitter. Perhaps that’s where all this is headed as the bubble gets bigger: large companies swallow up social media, interlink them, and monetize them under one umbrella, carefully targeted by demographic.

Until then, we’re left with fragmentation teetering on frustration. With so much social media out there, how does one have time to utilize it properly? Well, just like you pick your battles, you’re going to have to pick your social network.

Twitter, for example, is stuffed with early adopters, thought leaders, and technophiles. If this your target market, then it’s a good idea to be there Twittering too. Verizon’s John Czwartacki takes his company’s message to the lion’s den. In a crowd most likely to be pro-Net Neutrality, Czwartacki hasn’t missed the opportunity to present the positive aspects of his company to industry critics/bloggers.

So, microblogging is a useful public relations vehicle, or a place to be careful with your words as one PR pro found out recently. You connect with influencers, and have the opportunity to connect with the network of people they follow, but you also can keep tabs on projects – people love to talk about their projects.

Dave Winer, the self-titled original blogger and inventor of RSS recently Twittered (or tweeted?) about his New York Times "River" project, which allows readers to order their news to suit their preferences, rather than, as is tradition, allowing the editors to prioritize news.

It’s a two-way street. Winer keeps his "followers" abreast about what might be the next great platform, and if his followers ever get tired of him, they can simply un-follow him. That makes it an excellent vehicle for permission-based marketing – choosing not to follow someone is a built-in user-controlled spam filter.

Bloggers use microblogging as a supplement to their main blog by posting a short description of their latest blog post and a link. How long do you think it will be until the search engines begin crawling for that type of information?

But the real future blockbusters, I think, will be the microblogging platforms that are more tightly targeted and present more intuitively useful variations on the originals. It’s not hard to see how PlaceShout, for example, has an intrinsic value. It works like Twitter, but its goal is consumer reviews. Users have 100 characters to jazz or razz a place of business, and the reviews are overlaid on Google Maps.

The weakness right now, though, is fragmentation and saturation. Though options are good, too many choices produce social-media overload. You would have to hire at least one full time person to maintain your presences on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, the blogosphere, the forums, the search results – the list just keeps getting bigger.

One day, I can imagine Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offering full search/social/traditional media advertising packages that pull all of these things under one roof – a managed campaign offering. And they’ll probably be expensive. Until then, choose your media carefully, and use it to its full potential.

After all, Twitter is the one that has been getting all the geek cred from the Robert Scobles of the world, and from the sounds of it Twitter’s app has a far bigger reach.

So the big question is the one that Adam Ostrow at Mashable asks in his post on the deal: Why Jaiku and not Twitter? I know that Jaiku has its fans — including Leo Laporte, who got upset that Twitter’s name was too close to the word Twit (which is the abbreviated name of his podcast This Week in Tech), and quit the network to move over to Jaiku — but there’s no question that Twitter had the name. Not only that, but Evan Williams of Twitter is a former Googler himself, having sold Blogger to the search engine giant.

Could that be part of the reason why Twitter wasn’t as good a candidate for an acquisition? In the comments on Adam’s post at Mashable, someone raises that possibility, suggesting that there might be bad blood between Evan and Google over his departure and that of other former Googlers who left to go and work at Twitter.

Charlie O’Donnell says that he sees the deal as a case of Jaiku’s founders throwing in the towel and being absorbed by the Google Borg, something he says he finds disappointing. Google did the same thing with Dodgeball — which as far as I can recall was very much like Jaiku but was developed three years ago — and the founders later left, saying they were unhappy with the lack of support from the search behemoth.

Further reading:

Marc Orchant at Blognation has some thoughts about why Google decided to acquire Jaiku instead of Twitter, and so does Tim O’Reilly. Both see Jaiku as being more about mobile “presence” rather than just being an instant-messaging style service.

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The name isn’t the only similarity between the two recent purchases. Like Zingku, Jaiku is designed to appeal to mobile users. As Jaiku states in the acquisition FAQ:

Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The service was released on the Web in July 2006. Jaiku is based in Helsinki.

Oh. It’s like Twitter, then? Your Jaiku activity stream can include text messages, photos, events, recommendation, etc. So perhaps it’s Facebook+Twitter? (In case you’re wondering, Jyri is pronounced a little like “Yuri,” with the ‘r’ rolled. Except we don’t have the Finnish vowel ‘y’ in English. Well, rather than launch into a Finnish linguistics lesson, let’s focus, shall we?)

As with most Google acquisitions, they’re not disclosing specific plans for the future, saying only that “Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.” Also becoming par-for-the-course in new acquisitions—Google has limited current sign ups. (You can audition try here, though.)

Unlike now-older-sibling Zingku, however, Jaiku doesn’t seem to have built-in merchant appeal. Perhaps Jaiku is destined to partner more with Blogger than AdWords.

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