First-order effects

• Users of five services lose active products overnight: Google Video uploaders must find another home for content, Notebook note-takers are stranded mid-development-halt, Catalog Search disappears, and Dodgeball and Jaiku users face dead services despite loyal niches.
• Google's engineers and infrastructure shift toward high-usage properties — search, YouTube, Gmail — signaling internally that acquisition-driven experiments no longer get indefinite runway.

Second-order effects

• The Dodgeball founders' exit path becomes an object lesson in acqui-hire risk: acquired social startups can be starved rather than scaled, pressuring future acquisition targets to negotiate harder terms and pushing displaced users toward competitors like Twitter, which absorbed much of the early mobile-status energy Jaiku was chasing.
• Google Video's wind-down funnels video creators toward YouTube, concentrating the company's video bets on the property it already owns — a self-reinforcing consolidation competitors cannot easily counter.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, 'shut it down' becomes standard operating procedure at scale: Google normalizes killing even beloved products, which erodes user trust in committing data to any non-core service and raises switching costs psychology industry-wide.
• The graveyard approach eventually forces structural responses — clearer sunset policies, export tools, and migration paths (as later attempted with Google Video's migration effort to YouTube) — because repeated abrupt closures invite both regulatory scrutiny and reputational tax.