Last Wednesday (14/01/09) Google announced that they were stopping development of Google Notebook. Whilst they’ve assured users that the service isn’t going anywhere, it’s not exactly encouraging to hear that it’s not going to move forward again and inevitably we’ll see users migrating to other services in droves.

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

Other services have viewed this as an opportunity and are already offering Google Notebook import tools. UberNote is one of these, and whilst the interface doesn’t seem as polished as something like Evernote, I’m sure they will have benefitted from a large number of signups just on the basis of having a Google Notebook import option. Evernote have apparently reported on Twitter that they are working on an import tool, which will suit me down to the ground as I’ve been using Evernote as my primary note taking tool for the past year or so.

The decision seems a little strange to me, but perhaps the service wasn’t receiving enough attention to warrant development time, however Google have no other offerings in this area that match what the user is looking for and one would have thought that if Google would like to be going after Microsoft Office users, then offering a good note taking tool would be important in order to compete with OneNote.

It is amusing to note that their suggested “replacements” for the service: SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail, and Google Bookmarks. None of these services come anywhere close to the functionality of Google Notebook and target completely different needs.

As a final side note, as Google steps away from web based note taking, Microsoft have recently announced a “Labs” release of Thumbtack, which is their own web based note taking service.

Open Sourcing Jaiku

Another major announcement is that Google are planning to open source Jaiku, the micro-blogging service that they bought at the end of 2007.

After the migration [to Google App Engine] is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.

With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.

This has caused some consternation amonst some Jaiku users, but it looks to me as though the potential for Jaiku has opened up once again as it certainly seemed that any development completely ground to a halt after Google made the acquisition.

It’s not the first project that has seemed to die a death after being bought by Google, and it seems that many times these acquisitions are made to gain access to a good development team rather than the product itself.

Death Knells

Two other services are getting completely shutdown as well, Dodgeball and Mashup Editor, announced in conjunction with the above Jaiku announcement.

I have no familiarity with the Mashup Editor, although this is unsurprising as it was in a limited private beta. Dodgeball looks like another purchase for the minds behind it rather than the app itself, and perhaps similar functionality will one day appear on Android, Google’s mobile operating system.