There can be no doubt that Google is an innovator. The real question is how many of those innovations actually see success. Historical turns and we figure out the good and bad ideas, from ideas as good as Gmail and as bad as Buzz. Two more services being retired by Google in upcoming months are Google Health and Google PowerMeter.
The products, according to the announcement of product retirement, “didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped, but did serve as influential models.” Google Health, a service that lets users compile their personal health information from sources around the web, will be retired on January 1st of 2012, and all stored information will be available for download until the end of 2012. Google PowerMeter, a Google.org project designed to raise awareness of each user’s unique power consumption, will be retired on September 16th of this year.
“We believe [Google Health and Google PowerMeter] did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult,” read the official announcement. Google Health worked well for select groups, such as tech-savvy caregivers and fitness buffs, but Google hasn’t “found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.” The data on this site is being made available for simple download in numerous formats, including PDF, CCR, CSV, and XML. Google will also be partnering with the Direct Project protocol, a standard for health data that Google is standing behind.
Google PowerMeter, according to the official statement, “has helped demonstrate the importance of this [information] access and created something of a model. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like.” In this case, Google is deferring to other initiatives, including U.S. power use initiatives and smart energy products.
[Sources include: the Official Google Blog]
