End of life for Google Gear and other tools

The end is nigh for some Google tools, such as Google Gears, Wave and Knol, which have never captured the public's imagination.

The search engine giant said in October that it would be shutting down some products to concentrate on developing those tools that are more core to its future business plans.

Urs Hölzle, Google's operations vice president said in a blog post: "To recap, we're in the process of shutting a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward."

From 1 December the company will scale down Google Gears functionality. This Firefox and Internet Explorer extension allows users to navigate on compatible web sites offline and synchronise data when they go back online but from this date Gmail and Calendar offline will not work across all browsers. From the end of the month the tool will no longer be available to download.

Any users of Google Wave and Knol will see the demise of these tools next year. Wave was Google's initial foray into social networking before Buzz and Google+. The tool will become 'read only' in January and shut down completely in April

Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia which was launched in July 2008 will also shut down around the same time. On the site Goole advises users that it is working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum.

"This will be an open-source platform based upon WordPress that allows you to continue authoring and publishing scholarly articles.

"You can migrate your knols to WordPress and continue your work with Annotum. After May 1, you will no longer be able to create, view, enter or edit knols, but you will be able to export your knols to WordPress.com," Google said.