Google is shutting down Google Buzz in favor of its other social media offering, Google+.
There is no longer any buzz surrounding Google Buzz, as Google Inc. plans to kill off its microblogging service to focus more on its social networking Web site, Google+. But will Google+ succeed or be another failed attempt at a social network like Buzz? Google

Google announced this weekend that its older social network, Google Buzz, will be shut down after 19 months of existence in favor of the newer Google +.

Buzz will disappear completely in a few weeks after over a year and a half and poor reviews.

The search giants will also wave goodbye to a stream of other barely used products such as Code Search, a tool for finding open-source code on the web.

The social features will be stripped from iGoogle and there are plans in motion to shut down the University Research Program for Google Search.

Bradley Horowitz, Google vice president, said: "To succeed you need real focus and thought - thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don't work on."

"We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome."

Buzz was heavily criticised for its nonexistent privacy settings, with reports of a woman whose conversation with a partner was being watched by an abusive ex-boyfriend.

Information on Google Buzz will still be accessible on Google profiles, but further uploads to the service will be blocked.

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