Google Squared Rounded Up In Labs Apps Closure

Clint Boulton eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved,

Google Labs has announced a timetable for the imminent closure of Google Squared and other services

Google has set more closing dates for its various Google Labs Web services as part of CEO Larry Page’s plan to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. That is Page’s code for focusing on more strategic aspects of the company’s business, such as search, Google+, Android, Chrome and YouTube.

Page first issued the more wood, fewer arrows remark in June, when he shuttered Google Health and PowerMeter. This credo was the title of a blog post Google made in July to announce the gradual closure of Google Labs, the company’s broad experimentation effort.

Timetable Of Closures

Google said it would only announce new closures via the Labs Website. Search Engine Land noted that Google News Timeline, which surfaced news search items in a timeline format, closed on August 17, and that the Google Squared spreadsheet visualisation application would wind down on September 5.

Meanwhile, any Squares Squared users built with the service will be deleted unless they export them to CSV files or Google Spreadsheets using the Export function on the upper-right hand side of the Squared screen. Squared will still be featured in some search results.

Google has dates for more Labs closings. Script Converter, which let users read text in any language they chose, was closed last week.  The Sputnik JavaScript conformance test suite will be switched off next Wednesday and the Google Breadcrumb mobile learning tool will be shutting down on September 2. CityTours, which suggested popular sites to tourists via Google Maps, follows on September 6. Google Talk Guru, which let users get answers to a multitude of questions via Google Talk, will close at the end of September 2011, and Google Image Swirl, an image search trick that shows results in a circle graph, is going  soon.

Other Labs ventures escaped the axe. App Inventor for Android lives on at MIT. Google Scribe graduated from Google Labs and is used in Blogger. Swiffy, the developer tool that lets users convert Flash SWF files to HTML5, is moving to another domain. The Ngram Viewer e-reader will be graduating from Google Labs and will be incorporated into Google Books.