Google to shut Google Buzz

San Francisco - 15 Oct 2011 (IANS): Google announced to shut down the highly-controversial social networking productGoogle Buzz, along with several other services in the coming weeks, Xinhua reported.

Google on its official blog, Google announced the death penalty to its codesearch engine, Buzz, Jaiku which let users send updates to friends, the Google personalised homepage feature iGoogle, and the University Research Program forGoogle Search.

The shut-downs came as part of Google's housecleaning effort announced in early September, in which the company said it will shut down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features.

"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+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome," said Google in the blog post.

Google Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool integrated into Gmail service, has been widely criticised for privacy concerns and held back the search giant from expanding its businesses to the social networking space.

After Buzz, Google launchedGoogle+in June, which has been receiving a good response and passed the 40 million user mark, the company's chief executive officerLarry Pagesaid.