After a series of shut downs, Yahoo is sending  “Yahoo Buzz” to eternal slumber, effective on April 21, 2011. Interestingly, Yahoo announced the death of Buzz earlier on April 4, but perhaps no one noticed it. So, it scattered a few press releases on internet, but it seems that people decided to care today. The announcement of Buzz’s shut down was also given prominently on the top of the main page of Buzz page, which again went unnoticed. Launched in 2009, Buzz was another potentially useful service squandered by Yahoo.

The Buzz shut down isn’t entirely surprising, given Yahoo’s current restructuring issues and inability to fully grasp a cohesive social movement.  But equally as disappointing to the early adopter crowd is a recent closure by Google,including Google Video and Google Tags.  While the upload feature on Google Videos was disabled in May 2009, the playback function was still available. Now, the search ginat has deiced to completely take it off, along with all uploaded content. Here is an excerpt from an E-mail Google, signed by the “Google Video Team”,

“On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)”

The recent trial service, Google Tags is also going to be discontinued from April 29, 2011 as reported in a blog post by Google product manager, Shalini Agarwal.

“We’ve made a decision to shift our efforts toward other present and future product offerings for local businesses, and will be discontinuing this trial (referring to Google tags). To that end, we’ve now halted new signups and will be working with existing participating businesses over the coming weeks to help them meet their marketing needs with other Google products where possible.”

Service shut downs is part of our web-based experience, especially as large companies seek the best way to monetize “sub-leased” space.  Yahoo, still on a restructuring tear, put end to many of its services, including some popular ones like MyBlogLog. This blog community and data widget service will take place on May 24, 2011, according to an email announcement by the parent company.

The list includes some other important products like Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo Bookmarks, and Delicious as well as Yahoo’s traffic APIs. Fire Eagle and Yahoo People Search are among the products due to be merged, as Yahoo Alerts and Yahoo Calendar will be demoted to just features.

Another company shutting down services amidst a restructure is Cisco, which is  pulling out Flip camera from its portfolio as a part of its revived strategy that the company purchased last 2009 for about $600 million. It will retrench some 550 employees as well costing the company $300 million for lay off charges. Cisco said the move aims at serving its business customers by redirecting customers to them instead of buying straight from Cisco.

“We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,” Cisco CEO John Chambers said in a prepared statement. “As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network’s ability to deliver on those offerings.”