Failed Buzz to fall off Google+

Google has announced its intention to drop Buzz, the failed social predecessor to Google+.

The product launched in 2010 within Gmail but soon caught the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission over initially making Buzz users’ address books automatically visible to others. 

As with explanations for several other product closures in the past year, Google said will focus on its newest social network Google+, which CEO Larry Page last week claimed had attracted over 40 million users since its launch. 

“We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+,” said Google vice president of product, Bradley Horowitz. 

"We learned privacy is not a feature..." Horowitz added on his personal Google+ account.

"It is foundational to the product. And this awareness gave us the resolve to design privacy in from the very beginning, which led to Circles for sharing the right information with the right people, as well as transparency around which parts of your profile can be seen by whom." 

The Google Labs page, given the death sentence in July, as of Friday redirected users to the Google home page. 

Other products swept out in the latest cleanup round include open source code scouring tool Code Search, social product Jaiku, iGoogle social features and API access to Google search for selected researchers.

This year Google has also taken down Google Health, Power Meter and Google Toolbar in Firefox amongst others.