The 7 services the Goog is killing off are Google Bookmark Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol, Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C).

Rather than go through each of these one by one, I’m only going to concentrate on the ones I actually used, even if only very briefly.

Friend Connect admittedly had potential, but the problem is that it was ironically used in a disconnected way. It’s supposed to be a social thing but the plain fact of the matter is that it’s not easy to use. When it comes to social, the design has to be stupidly simple (or at least have the appearance as such), else nobody will use it.

Gears I never quite understood. In a nutshell, internet apps that used Gears were supposed to keep locally-installed stuff in order to use said apps offline as well as on. What I didn’t understand was that this in turn just added extra bulk to an app which was supposed to be small in the first place.

With Wave, I remember what that first came out and can easily be labeled as "the greatest thing Google ever produced that absolutely nobody knew what to do with". Fortunately, Apache (who now owns Wave) should be able to use the Wave framework for its intended purpose – which was supposed to be real-time collaborative editing.

Knol was supposed to be Google’s answer to Wikipedia. Nobody ever used it. Yes, it was well-though-out and very good for reference material and whatnot, but it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia.

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