Google abandons green tech initiative, axes Knol, Wave, Friend Connect and other services

Google Wave is no more.

Google already shut down Android developer forums, closed Labs, phased out Google Desktop, killed off questions and answer site Advark and gave up on a whole lot of other services. With that in mind, the latest batch of Google services heading to the technology graveyard will surprise hardly anyone.

The streamlining of the company continues as the search Goliath announced in a blog post yesterday that Knol, Wave, Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears and Search Timeline are goners, too. They are also shutting down the RE<C project which aimed to lower the cost of renewable energy (RE<C is an acronym for “renewable energy” [RE] is cheaper than coal [C]”). This comes after Google’s green arm had poured over $850 million into various renewable energy projects.

Google’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page said his company would kill off  a number of smaller products in order to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. The Jobs-ification of Google is supposed to allow the company to become more agile as it sets its sights on moon shots, ambitious projects which could metamorphose into the pillars of Google’s future growth.

Page took the reigns at Google on April 4, taking over from Eric Schmidt who was promoted  the company’s chairman. Head down past the break for the full list of discontinued products and their respective end-of-life dates, per Google’s post.

Google Bookmarks Lists — This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which we’re going to end on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labeled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual. As Lists was an English-only feature, non-English languages will be unaffected.

Google Friend Connect — Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We’re retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.

Google Gears — In March we said goodbye to the Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers. On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome.

Google Search Timeline — We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the “ngram viewer” in Google Books offers similar information.

Google Wave — We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.

Knol — We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.