Google to Shut Down Picnik, Social Graph API and Urchin, Open-Sourcing Sky Map
Google's spring cleaning campaign continues, the the company just announced the closure of a number of products, including the popular Picnik online photo editor which, until recently, was integrated into Yahoo's Flickr, for example.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second wave of Google's 'spring cleaning' in two months, following November's announcement that Knol, Friend Connect and Wave would be shuttered — and it echoes a pattern going back to the January 2009 cull of Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and Jaiku. The company is clearly running product retirements as a scheduled program rather than one-off decisions.
Picnik's fate closes a short loop: Google bought the online photo editor in March 2010 and had it embedded in Yahoo's Flickr until recently, so the shutdown strands both direct users and partners who built around it. Marketing Land's pickup flags the nuance that matters to developers — the Social Graph API dies while OpenSocial itself does not.
First-order effects
- Developers relying on the Social Graph API and site owners running Urchin for web analytics lose their tools outright and must migrate to alternatives with no transition path announced.
- Flickr and any other partner sites that had integrated Picnik lose their photo-editing layer, forcing an immediate replacement decision; Sky Map's open-sourcing hands the Android astronomy app to whoever wants to maintain it.
Second-order effects
- Third-party online photo editors get an opening to court displaced Picnik users and to pitch Flickr on an integration slot Google just vacated.
- The Marketing Land distinction between the dead Social Graph API and the surviving OpenSocial forces developers to re-sort which of Google's social surfaces are safe to build against.
Third-order effects
- With major shutdown rounds now landing in 2009, November 2011 and January 2012, depending on any non-core Google product becomes a calculable platform risk — partners and developers will price in a retirement horizon before committing integration work.
- If the cadence holds, Google's portfolio management normalizes the idea that even popular, paid-for acquisitions can be retired within two years, raising the bar for what counts as strategically protected inside the company.
The trend: Google is institutionalizing recurring 'spring cleaning' culls as core portfolio discipline, turning product longevity at the company into a standing risk factor for anyone building on its platforms.