Google axes failed Buzz service to focus on Google+

Google has axed a number of its social networking products, including its disastrous Buzz tool, in order to solely focus on Google+.

Buzz was the firm's first attempt to rival the likes of Facebook and Twitter by allowing Gmail users to share real-time updates but the tool met with controversy from the start.

Google appalled privacy campaigners by integrating Gmail users into the social network without their consent and selecting the Gmail accounts that users would follow based on their most frequent contacts.

To make matters worse, all this information was made public, and Google had to revisit its privacy settings after receiving an avalanche of complaints and ended up paying out almost £8.5m in compensation to privacy groups.

The firm said that while it was now closing Buzz it had learnt important lessons from the product that were helping to focus the development of Google+.

"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past," said Google product vice president, Bradley Horowitz, in the company blog.

"We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+."

The Google+ social networking service was launched in June and now boasts more than 40 million users.

The firm is also set to close Jaiku, a mobile social network it acquired in 2007.

The service allowed users to micro-blog in a similar way to Twitter, but the product never got a lot of attention from Google, and in 2009 the firm announced it would hand over Jaiku's code to the open source community.

Google has also announced the forthcoming closures of Code Search, which provides search for open source code, and its University Research Program for Google Search, which provides select academic researchers with API access to the firm's search results.

Google also confirmed it closed down Google Labs on Friday, as previously announced. Google Labs was used by the firm to launch and test very early prototypes of its products.