Google slimming down six projects

In a series of separate posts on official Google blogs, the company announced it is terminating, stopping development on, or restricting access to six products: Catalog Search, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Mashup Editor, Notebook and Video.

Starting "in a few months," Google Video will no longer allow user uploads, according to the Google Video Blog. In 2007, Google turned off users' access to paid videos on Google Video.

Google recently added video upload capability to Picasa Web Albums.

Google Catalog Search is getting the ax, says the Inside Google Book Search blog. Launched as a "demonstration" of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that eventually made it into Google Book Search, it's being shuffled off with the farewell, "It was a great experiment."

Online research tool Google Notebook is losing its developers. It will stay live for now but the blog post announcing its imminent stagnation points to products that perform some of Notebook's functions: the SearchWiki function, Google Docs, Tasks (in GMail) and Google Bookmarks.

Mobile social networking service Dodgeball, acquired by Google in 2005, will also be shut down "in the next couple of months," according to a company blog. Once a popular social/geolocation experiment, it's been largely supplanted by Twitter.

Google's Mashup Editor, which never made it out of private beta, will be terminated, "in favor of the more powerful App Engine," says the Google Code Blog.

Social networking and micro-blogging service Jaiku may live on with support from a "volunteer team" of Google employees. But the main product is getting ported to the Google App Engine, and will be released as open source, according to the Code Blog.

Other blogs such as TechCrunch and Center Networks are calling for VoIP service Grand Central and Knol, which collects user-written articles on a number of topics, as the next projects to join Google's scrap bin.

Original article: Google killing Jaiku, Dodgeball, Notebook, other projects from CNET News.com