Two weeks old, Photovine shutters as Slide team disolved and founder Max Levchin leaves Google

AllThingsD is reporting this evening that Google will shutdown Slide, a company they acquired for $200 million last year. All of Slide’s products will be shutdown — except Prizes.org (via TechCrunch). While the rest of the Slide team will continue to work at Google, Slide’s found Max Levchin is leaving. A Google spokesperson told AllThingsD:

“Max has decided to leave Slide and Google to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the best. Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities.”

Before being shutdown by Google, the Slide team was hard at work on Photovine, a photo sharing app that was released by Google just one week ago. The app was focused on sharing photos specific to a certain category, or vine, with the community. Sadly, Photovine will receiving the axe over the next few months — along with Slide’s other products like Disco and Pool Party. So why would Google kill off a part of their company that released something just a week ago.. and paid $200 million for?

Updated: Slide’s official blog post has gone up. Continue after the break..

Google’s CEO Larry Page has gone on record saying Google is killing off smaller products, in order to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. This is evident when Google killed Labs, and now today Slide. I’d expect more products to come.

Slide’s blog post:

We wanted to give you all advance notice that in the coming months, a number of Slide’s products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide’s products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party. We created products with the goal of providing a fun way for people to connect, communicate and share. While we are incredibly grateful to our users and for all of the wonderful feedback over the years, many of these products are no longer as active or haven’t caught on as we originally hoped.

Most importantly, we wanted to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re committed to helping our users preserve their data as easily as possible. We recognize that many of you have stored valuable content with us and want to assure you that, wherever possible, you will have ample time to download that information or transfer it to another service..