Google Kills Services: Notebook, Dodgeball, Others Gone

From PC World: Google is shutting down various unpopular projects it has been working on and is also sacking about 100 employees, in what it seems to be a bad week at the search giant's offices around the world.

So what is actually happening? Well, the bad economic times are catching up with the search giant, so Google is downsizing by closing some unpopular or unproductive projects and is shifting to fewer engineering site.

Google announced that it will end development and close down in the coming months Jaiku, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, Google Notebook and uploads for Google Video. At the same time, the company will be hiring at a reduced rate, though laying off 100 recruiters and reshuffling another 70 engineering staff worldwide to other locations.

Jaiku, the less popular Twitter clone, will become a part of Google Apps while Dodgeball, the mobile social networking will be discontinued. None of these two services were wildly popular, but at least Google Apps users will soon have Jaiku as a built-in microblogging platform to enjoy. On a larger scale, this means that Twitter will only have one competitor left - FriendFeed, which funnily enough was founded by former Google employees.

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