Google to shut Picnik, Sky Map among others

Google has gone ahead and started the process of shutting down some more services. The search giant had decided late last year that it would disable the services that weren’t doing too well for them. The decision was taken and a bunch of services were disabled through the months. Late last week, Google disabled another bunch of these services. The most popular ones from the lot are Picnik and Sky Map. GMC (Google Message Continuity), Needlebase, Urchin and the Social Graph API are some of the other projects to go down under very soon. Picnick, was a fairly popular image editing service based on the cloud. Google had bought over the service back in 2010 and after close to two years in service, it will be shut on the 19th of April. Those who have been using Picnik all this while, have the option of downloading all their images together using a service called Picnik Takeout. Users also have the option to copy their images to Google+.

Google Sky Map, was a project for Android phones that allowed users to look up at the sky and pinpoint at the stars. Although nifty, it didn’t gain the popularity Google expected it to. Fortunately for the project, it’s being open-sourced and it will be developed and handled by the Carnegie Mellon University. Development may be in the form of student projects in the future. 

One of many to be shut

Other projects, such as the Google Message Continuity were designed to be e-mail disaster recovery products meant for use with Microsoft Exchange. Google’s seen fair success in Google Message Continuity, but they’ve seen better days in the Google Apps space, where businesses have opted for it over other competing products. Urchin, which helped Google create the base platform for Google Analytics. The client version of the software was called Urchin Software and starting March 2012, it won’t be available anymore. Needlebase, a data management platform that was acquired recently will be evaluated and maybe integrated with other Google services.

Google’s blog post by VP of Product Management, Dave Girouard emphasised that taking these decisions is difficult as there are plenty of people who love these services. He said that Google would focus their resources and time on other services.