Google Giving ‘Buzz’ the Axe

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Everyone’s favorite Twitter clone that never really went anywhere is being put to sleep sometime in the next few weeks. Google Buzz was launched in February of 2010, immediately ran into trouble for opting every Gmail user into the service, and ended up paying out an $8.5 million settlement later that year. It’s seen a lot of hoopla for a service nobody uses, in other words.

And then there’s Google+, which now pretty well makes Buzz completely irrelevant. Says Google:

“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. 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. 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.”

While we likely won’t see any measurable outrage over Buzz’s closure, Google’s also closing down Code Search, Jaiku, iGoogle’s social features, Google Labs, and the University Research Program for Google Search if you want to try to find something in the list to get whipped up about. Other than that, the old “fail fast” adage appears to be alive and well.

MORE: A Brief History of Google’s Social Networking Flops