Google Bloodbath Continues, Many Services Affected

: Image via CrunchBase

As expected, the bad news from Google doesn’t end with yesterday’s layoff announcement. They’ve also announced the shutdown of several Google services (Google Reader is in the clear, though, whew!).

Included among the soon-to-be-deceased are: Google Notebooks, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Video, Google Mashup Editor, and future development of Jaiku, although the service itself will continue.

Jaiku is ported to the Google App Engine and will be released as an open source project on Google Code. There will be no further development on it from Google but it will continue to stay online.

Dodgeball, which allowed users to share their current locations using text messages, will be discontinued entirely, though Google has not set a specific timeframe (“a couple of months”).

The Mashup Editor (in private beta) will be replaced by the App Engine.

Google Notebook will continue to function for current users but will no longer accept new ones. However, existing users won’t be able to use the browser extension, which does make it much less useful.

Catalog Search was meant to show off Optical Character Recognition. Now, it has shifted to Google’s Book Search.

Finally, Google Video will have its upload capabilities disabled in a few months, though users will still be able to watch content that’s already in the system. This has been a long time coming, as Google Video has largely been considered redundant following Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

(UPDATE: Does anyone else find it ironic that Google mentioned the engineering layoffs in a post called “Changes to Engineering” and then, about five posts later, there is a new post called “Building Engineers“? You could just cut the irony with a knife.)