my social production

Above, an email waiting in my inbox this morning. Below, an excerpt from Google’s blog post:

Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them.

Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world. …

Oh no! I am sad about the loss of Aardvark. Google not only failed to improve it but is now shutting it down. At least the folks who made vark.com will be “moved over to higher-impact products” but damn… :-(