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Tag: Google Video

  • Google Is Shutting Down More Services

    Google Is Shutting Down More Services

    Google announced late on Friday that it is shutting down a few more services: Google Apps For Teams, Google Listen and Google Video for Business.

    “We introduced Google Apps for Teams in 2008 to allow people with a verified business or school email address to collaborate using non-email applications from Google like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk,” says Google Director of Engineering, Max Ibel. “Over time, we realized that Google Apps for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally anticipated.”

    On September 4, Google Apps for Teams accounts will be converted into personal Google accounts, as the service shuts down.

    “We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts,” says Ibel. “However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function.”

    Users’ podcast subscriptions will still be accessible via Google Reader, in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder, where they can be downloaded.

    Last month, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Video, and this time its Google Video for Business.

    “Google Video for Business is a video hosting and sharing solution that allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education customers to use video for internal communication,” explains Ibel. “Starting this fall, we’ll migrate all videos hosted on Google Video for Business over to Google Drive, which has similar storage and sharing capabilities. All migrated videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota.”

    Usually, when Google shuts down services, there tends to be a significant amount of backlash from users who were happy with the product. The company has shut down over 30 products since Larry Page took over as CEO last year. Some have had bigger backlashes than others, but nobody can say Google hasn’t tried a ton of ideas.

    Google also indicated that it will be shutting down a number of its blogs. It has over 150 of them, and has decided that consolidating the information that would have been spread out across these is a better strategy to ensure that more people are actually reading that information. Google will shut down the ones that are either updated infrequently or are redundant with other blogs. This should cut down on Google’s own duplicate content. They do a lot of cross-posting.

    Last week, Google shut down the Google Mobile blog, but introduced a new Android blog to replace it. The former now redirects to the latter.

  • Google Trims the Fat Off of Products; Google Mini, Google Video, Symbian Get Chucked

    If Google was some digitized version of Wipeout!, inevitably some of the products won’t get to move on and compete in the next round. It’s a fact of life: there has to be losers. For at least a few of those products, the judge’s scores have been added and today Google will be sending them home with a sad collection of consolation prizes.

    Actually, they don’t even get that much; Google’s just pulling the plugs on these misfit products and sending them to the big Google server in the sky. Some of these products are just redundancies of more popular products while others simply never caught on with users.

    The first product to go meet the butcher is Google Talk Chatback. Since Google purchased Meebo, it’s turning off Chatback and encouraging people to migrate over to the Meebo bar if they want to provided some kind of embedded chat among visitors.

    Although Google didn’t specify a date, it will “soon” be retiring the Symbian Search App. There’s no replacement for this one, unless you want to be imaginative and consider google.com as an alternative.

    Later this month on July 31, Google will be closing down Google Mini. If you’re going to miss this service, Google recommends trying out Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search for your enterprise needs.

    Google Video, which hasn’t been accepting uploads since May 2009, will finally be absorbed into YouTube. All of the hosted content on Google Video will be moved to YouTube and automatically marked as private videos on August 20. However, if you’ve still got content on Google Video, you can manually move your videos to YouTube before that date. Once your videos are moved, you’ll be able to access them via YouTube Video Manager.

    Finally, iGoogle, Google’s attempt at allowing users to create a personal homepage replete with widgets and other quick access to Google apps, will be climbing the scaffold… eventually. For some reason, Google is waiting until November 1, 2013 – that’s not even this November! – to close down iGoogle. The first part of this closure, though, is that Google will no longer accept theme submissions and new gadgets past July 31, 2012, so if you want to hurry up and develop some new product for a web service that’s admittedly on life support, you better get right to it. In the meantime, developers will still be able to update existing gadgets after this month.

    Meanwhile, the rest of Google’s quadzillion products will remain in service.

    [Via Google’s Official Blog.]

  • Google Adds Captions For Google+ Video

    Unless you closely follow most Google employees on Google+, you may have missed the announcement yesterday of a new feature that has been added to the Google+ video player. Google+ videos now have a closed caption option, allowing caption files to be uploaded along with the video.

    The quiet announcement came via Google Accessibility Engineer James deBoer’s Google+ page, where he revealed the new feature on behalf of Google’s accessibility team. From the post:

    Why add captions, you ask? Adding captions and subtitles makes your videos more accessible to people who can’t follow along with the audio — either because they speak a different language, or because they are deaf or hard of hearing.

    As deBoer points out, the captions can be used as subtitles in videos featuring foreign languages. Though the new closed caption button on the Google+ video player does look the same as the one on YouTube, it is unclear whether Google+ allows the many closed captioning features that were added to YouTube earlier this year.

    DeBoer went on to give a brief rundown of how uploading closed captions would work. As seen in the picture above, a user can open up a Google+ video in lightbox view and choose the “Closed captions” option in the “Options” menu at the bottom of the screen. From there, it is a simple matter of clicking on the “Add new captions or transcript” option and uploading the caption file.

    (Picture courtesy James deBoer)

  • Google Adds Instant to More Search Types, Countries

    Google announced some new features for Google Instant. They haven’t released it for the browser or for mobile yet, but they have added some desktop functionality. 

    First off, they have added keyboard navigation, so you can use Google Instant without touching your mouse, should you choose to do so. The navigation lets you scroll through Google’s search suggestions to bring up more instant results. 

    Secondly, Google Instant has now been added to more of Google’s search options in the left panel, including Videos, News, Books, Blogs, Updates, and Discussions. For some reason, Images is not included.

    Google also announced that Google Instant is rolling out in the domains for 12 new countries, including: Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

    Google Instant was available for seven countries until now.