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Google Buzz to close, along with Google Labs

A day after announcing Google Plus has 40m users, Google has announced it's to close Buzz, its previous effort at social networking.

Joe Svetlik Reporter
Joe has been writing about consumer tech for nearly seven years now, but his liking for all things shiny goes back to the Gameboy he received aged eight (and that he still plays on at family gatherings, much to the annoyance of his parents). His pride and joy is an Infocus projector, whose 80-inch picture elevates movie nights to a whole new level.
Joe Svetlik
2 min read

Well you certainly can't accuse Google of being in denial. It's closing Buzz, one of its past efforts at social networking, to focus on Google Plus. A few others in its product line are also for the chop, including Google Labs and the University Research program for Google Search.

It made the announcement in a blog post, saying Buzz would close in a few weeks because it wanted to focus on Google Plus. Just a day earlier, it announced Google Plus had reached 40 million users.

"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past," the blog entry reads. "We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome."

Google have been pretty honest that Buzz was a bit of a failure, but will Google Plus fare much better? Earlier this week an engineer at the company accidentally went public with a rant about how Google doesn't understand platforms, labelling Google Plus a "pathetic afterthought" and adding it was a "knee-jerk reaction." CEO Larry Page appeared to let his account lie dormant for a month, but it's still early days -- the social network has only been open to the public a few weeks, and potential new features could include phone calls and the ability to ask an expert.

Google Labs will also close, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and Like.com will be replaced by Google Product Search. Last month the search giant announced it would kill off 10 of its products, including Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, and Google Maps API for Flash. Not exactly killer products.

Will Google Plus succeed where Buzz failed? And what about Wave, what was that all about? Let us know on our Facebook page.