In what may be a first, Google is closing down part of its empire – albeit a little-known photo-sharing service called Hello that was acquired as part of Picasa in 2005.
There’s probably been Google services that have quietly disappeared into the bowels of the Googleplex never to be seen again (Dodgeball?) but closing a service has not been part of Google’s operating manual.
Then again, when you have an army of developers spending churning out new services, at some point you have a buffet of products (or “100 children” as Monster founder Jeff Taylor describes it). Not all of them can be successful even if you slap the Google brand on them.
In the book “It’s All Too Much” about battling clutter, they suggest that for every thing new you bring into your house, you throw something out. Maybe Hello is just Google doing some de-cluttering.
For more, check out Mathew Ingram, who says Hello was a solid service. As well, check out Ryan Spoon’s list of the 15 online services he would pay to use.
2 Comments
I haven’t read “It’s all too much” but I do take that approach with subscribed rss feeds. If I add a new one I remove at least one existing one. I try to stick to that with clothes as well. I’m hoping to whittle my wardrobe down to 2 nice pairs of coveralls.
google must have another card up there sleeve somewhere.
or perhaps they feel hello can’t compete with flicker?
well you got me on that.