WebProNews

About nine months ago, there was an announcement that a Google AdWords “Click-to-Call” test had been discontinued.  The message turned out to be a hoax, but a post that came out yesterday is, to all appearances, not.  And so the Google Click-to-Call feature in Google Maps is no more.

Word of its demise came from “Maps Guide Mike,” who, on the Google Maps Help Group forum, stated, “this feature was a long-running experiment, and in the end it was decided to discontinue it.”  There hasn’t been a single reply to Mike’s post, which may help explain how that decision was reached.

But Click-to-Call did have its followers.  Download Squad’s Grant Robertson calls the development “[s]ad news, as this was an innovative piece of Google’s heralded Maps service.”

Over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern adds, “I, like Grant, liked this piece of technology.  Perhaps the GrandCentral acquisition has something to do with it?”

There are no real clues to Google’s thought process, however.  Maps Guide Mike only wrote, “There are however lots of other features we’re adding to maps in the hope of making it even more useful.  And if you are in the United States and liked click-to-call, check out a different experiment we’re doing.”  The different experiment is, somewhat ironically, GOOG-411.