Google Jaiku, Dodgeball, Notebook

Google Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Notebook
Death announcement: January 2009

Apparently the whole "spring cleaning" thing does not apply to Google, which did its housekeeping two weeks into the new year. In one day. the search giant announced that it would soon be shuttering its Jaiku microblogging service, social network Dodgeball (which it had purchased four years prior), as well as its Notebook service. For the sake of simplicity, we've condensed them into one slide, and one product in our count up to 15.

Other, less high-profile sites that were taken down as part of the sweep include Google's video service, which became largely useless after the company bought YouTube in 2006, as well as Google Catalog Search and Google Mashup Editor.

Interestingly enough Jaiku lives on, although not as a funded Google project. The site's about page now notes that it's being run by a skeleton crew of Google's engineers who fix bugs and give it some attention when they're not on the clock. Despite this, many of the site's once-prominent users have left for greener pastures.

Also, Dodgeball went on to become re-imagined by one of its co-founders who had left Google prior to the site being shuttered. Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley came up with Foursquare, a geographically-inclined social-networking tool that lets users check-in when they get to bars, restaurants, and other local hot spots.