Google closes down lesser-known services, lays off staff

The constraints of a struggling economy have finally gripped Google's staff and some of its lesser-known and experimental services. Across a collection of company blog posts, the search giant announced a relatively small batch of layoffs and staff shuffling, as well as the shuttering of little-known or little-used services like Jaiku and Google Notebook.

Google's layoffs and a pending rearrangement of remote engineering staff are perhaps the most significant of all these announcements. With two posts on the Official Google Blog, Google detailed changes to engineering and changes to recruitment. Google says it has thousands of engineers working in 40 offices across more than 20 countries, and 70 of those engineers from offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden will either be reassigned to other projects or let go (some reports claim that these 70 are being laid off; they are inaccurate). This follows a Phoenix, Arizona engineering restructure last September due to "highly fragmented" projects, a decision Google came to "after a lot of soul searching."

Approximately 100 from Google's recruitment staff will be laid off, but the company reiterates statements from its October quarterly earnings call that it is still hiring. However, the reduced pace of bringing on new employees led the company to discontinue its contracts with external recruiting services and, alas, even shed some personnel from within.

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Shuttered services

Among Google's products to have plugs pulled, microblogging service Jaiku and location-based social network Dodgeball are likely the two most significant, announced in a joint blog post. Google purchased Jaiku, a more feature-full competitor to Twitter, in October 2007, and there was a lot of potential to integrate it into everything from Gmail to what eventually became Google's Android mobile phone OS. A lack of communication and creeping neglect began driving users to jump ship for Twitter by January 2008, though, and Google announced this week that it will no longer actively develop Jaiku's codebase. After porting the software to the Google App Engine, the Jaiku Engine will be open sourced and the service will live on "thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers."

Dodgeball, on the other hand, will not experience life after death via volunteers. As a mobile social network similar to Brightkite and Loopt that Google purchased in 2005, Dodgeball suffered stagnation like Jaiku and will simply be shut down in "the next couple of months."

Google Notebook and Google Video are also getting axes of their own, though neither will be completely shut down. In a blog post, Google announced that it will stop active development on Google Notebook, a Backpack-like service that borrows from Gmail's UI and allows users to collect snippets of web information. Starting next week, Google will no longer add new features to Google Notebook, its Firefox extension will cease to work, and new users will not be able to sign up. Service will continue (for now) for existing users, though the loss of its browser extension is a blow to Google Notebook's appeal and usability. Google never got around to finding a way to monetize Google Notebook, and it naturally recommends similar Google products that users can try instead, such as Google Docs and Bookmarks. Even "Tasks in Gmail" is recommended, despite being a beta feature (for a beta e-mail service) that has no guarantee of getting incorporated into Gmail.

Finally, Google Video, long considered to be a redundant product since Google purchased YouTube, will no longer be accepting uploads in a few months. The Google Video site will still work and all content uploaded directly to it will remain live. But Google clearly wants to morph the product into a video search engine for all videos across the web, instead of a community destination like YouTube.