Google to kill off Google Buzz, Labs goes the way of the dodo

Remember when Google launched a Twitter-esque social network of sorts and they called it Buzz? Neither do we.

Of course, we kid, but Google Buzz really was a pretty pathetic attempt at social networking, especially for a company like Google. People picked it up and started playing with it to see what it was like, and then simply dropped it a few minutes later and completely forgot about it, just like a little kid with a short attention span. Sounds an awful lot like what is happening with a current social network that Google is working on, but it’s really not as bad.

In any circumstance, Google announced yesterday that they will be shutting down Buzz and its API to focus more on Google+. They mentioned that “while people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile.”

It’s not only Google Buzz that’s receiving the axe, but also Jaiku, Google Code Search, iGoogle’s social features, and the University Research Program for Google Search, most of which will officially shut down in January.

Another big service that Google has killed off is Google Labs, which we learned about back in July. The one service that we all love officially shut down yesterday, but it won’t affect any of the Labs add-ons that you’re using. Google didn’t specifically mention how they would publicly test new experiments from now on, but I’m sure they will come up with another method sooner or later.

Here’s what Google had to say about all the changes:

Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.”