Some excitement on Social Media this morning, something which rarely happens seemed to be happening at the moment: Google seemed to be down for many. It was first noticed when Gmail couldn’t be reached, but it seems more Google products were down, even Google.com.

The ‘glitch’ took only about five minutes, but there immediately were responses on Social Media of people being worried about what was happening with Google. It showed once again how reliant people are on the Google services. The last time Gmail was down was in April when about 400.000 people were out of Gmail for about 2,5 hours. This time it was just a few minutes.

It could be that the outage had to do with the closing of some products by Google today. (more…)

Ever since Larry Page took his reign back from Eric Schmidt at Google one trend has been prominent: saying goodbye to products which are of no use anymore to Google. We’ve seen many products being closed in the past year or so and now we can add several more to them, amongst which iGoogle and Google Video. (more…)

There are many products developed or bought at Google. Most of the products come from the famous 20 percent time at Google. Some of them actually become separate successful products, like GMail for example. Others are mostly meant to be part of a ‘bigger’ project, like for example Urchin, which was meant to be the installable version of Google Analytics and played a huge part in the development of that product.

But sometimes these products lose their use and at that point Google wants to ‘clean them up’. Last week Google announced the ‘death’ of no less than six products, including Urchin and the Social Graph API. That is not needed anymore with Google’s other social identifying tools. (more…)