No significant reasons, but Google is shutting down some of its products in favor of new ones. This was its only business strategy, which says that withdrawing products at right time is as much important as introducing new ones to keep alive itself in the market.

iGoogle: (May2005-Nov2013)

It is a personalized home page from google. You can create your own theme and add any number of gadgets along with google search box at the top. Though you can create your customized tabs, with so many gadgets on one page, you can access data from multiple website & server through single home page. For example you can simultaneously check yahoo, FB, Gmail, bookmarks and many more. I personally was in love with a ease to get to the concerned stuff with a single start page. Google reasoned that the today’s web/mobile world is getting mature and providing the real-time information at your fingertips eroded the need for iGoogle over time. Google offers “Google Play” on android device and “Chrome Web Store” for desktop user as a more mature alternative to iGoogle. I started using chrome web store but still not much comfortable with it. I hate the only links provided in case of apps, but prefer plugins which can be installed in your browser from web store.

Google Reader (Oct 2005-July2013)

It is a content application and platform that is an aggregation of content served by web feeds. I love it to accumulate all of my interested pages arranged categorically on a single app. It helps you to get latest updates on your interest by fetching latest news from your subscribed page. So we could have content from vast variety of sources all in same place instead of navigating blog to blog. Google reasoned that its usage is declining (how come?) and they want to focusing on other stuffs:; There are lots of alternative in the market for google reader, but I prefer Feedly; Reasons - First come first serve:) ; Appealing UI; Providing interface to import all the rss/feed stored in google-reader before it get expired. I started using feedly and saved my RSSs.

Google Buzz (Feb 2010-Dec2011)

It was a microblogging and messaging tool and integrated with gmail. It seems to be a initiative to compete in the market with Twitter’s/Facebook but all in vain. This was attempt to create something similar to facebook status and included several interface and interaction elements from other Google products (e.g., Google Reader) such as the ability to “like” a post. The reason for shutting down Buzz from google was obvious and that is just to focus on Google+. So the buzz was a social communication and that can be filled with google+ or others. I never or occasionally used Buzz and don’t need any alternative and for social networking I am happy with rest of the world.

Google Latitude:(Feb 2009 - Aug 2013) Now it’s turn for Google latitude.

Latitude was location sharing app, which is available on mobile as well as on desktop browser. This app integrated with google maps uses cellular positioning, Wi-Fi positioning, and GPS for automatically location detection on mobile phones. This was the well renowned app to locate your friends or dear ones on google maps from anywhere. I received a mail today that Google latitude will no longer be part of google maps and will be retiring on 9th Aug 2013. And just for alternatives Google added location sharing feature to its Google+ and I know that is to promote it and bind everything with Google+ with a only expectation that user will start using Google+ some day. There are many location sharing apps in the android market but I have never tried any of them yet.