According to a new post by Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, on the official company blog, Google is delivering the death blow to several more products and services, including its code search engine, Buzz, Jaiku, iGoogle features and the University Research Program for Google Search, the latter which provides API access to Google Search results for a small number of academic institutions.

Here are the details on the new shutdowns, per Google:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

Google also said that it will be closing down the Google Labs site, as it promised earlier. That site will be gone as of today, so get your last visit in now. In addition, Boutiques.com and Like.com will now be replaced by Google Product Search.

These latest closures come on the heels of several other service shutdowns from the company whose previous strategy seemed to involve throwing a bunch of a spaghetti on the wall to see what sticked. In June, it shut down Google Health. In August, Google killed off the projects from its Slide acquisition, and in September, it killed Aardvark. Despite all the streamlining and shutdowns, Google has previously stated that its “20% Time Project” isn’t going anywhere.

It’s been a fascinating year in the social networking space, as heavyweight champion Facebook fends off some solid blows from muscley contender Google Plus. However over the past week, it’s been nearly all Facebook – with the release of the Subscriber button and vastly improved lists (akin to Google Plus "circles"). This week, or perhaps I should say round, is also shaping up to be a big one for Facebook. Its annual developer conference F8 is on this Thursday in San Francisco. According to uber-blogger Robert Scoble, "Facebook has one of its biggest releases ever coming this week." ReadWriteWeb will be at F8 to cover whatever big punches Facebook delivers.

Meanwhile the Google Plus team has been fairly quiet lately, other than the announcement of a (limited) API last week. Here are five things we wish Google Plus would do, both to improve its still nascent product and to make Facebook stagger a little against the ropes!

1. Automate creation and maintenance of Circles.

This has been my number one problem with Google Plus so far: the large amount of effort it takes up front to create circles of people (a.k.a. friends lists) and then the ongoing hassle of maintaining them.

Facebook showed the way forward for Google Plus, by launching improved – and semi-automated – friends lists last week. Facebook now automatically creates lists based on your location, workplace and a couple more bits of information from your profile. It’s still relatively simple and not perfectly implemented. But it’s a damn sight better than starting from scratch, which Google Plus makes you do.

2. Add a special search box for Google Plus.

While any public content on Google Plus can be searched using ordinary Google search, any private post or data about Circles is hidden from Google.com. The Google Plus team knows this is something their users want, so it’s likely they’re working on an internal Google Plus search as we speak. It will be a great addition when it finally happens, because neither Facebook or Twitter does a good job archiving and surfacing old posts.

Twitter has a notoriously short memory, while Facebook has (up till now) been happy to make its users ‘live in the moment.’ A decent Google Plus search will make Facebook reassess that, because suddenly Google Plus would become kind of a memory bank for its users. The success of Evernote – a note-taking app which markets itself as an "online brain" – is an indicator that social networks need a longer memory.

3. Open up the API!

The Google+ API is limited to public data, so external developers won’t be able to tap into private data or information about Circles. It’s a no-brainer to eventually open it up and the Google Plus team has stated this will happen. Given that the entire Facebook platform is predicated on third party developers accessing private information about users, this can’t come soon enough for Google Plus if it wants to rapidly build its platform.

(If you aren't sure what I mean by third party apps accessing your private Facebook data, just recall how many times you've clicked "yes" to a web app that requests to be able to write to your Facebook wall and seemingly do anything it else it pleases with your data.)

Update: Google engineer Will Norris questioned the above statement, in Google Plus of course: “remind me again why it’s in users’ best interest to rush out and enable that on Google+.” My response: it’s in users’ interest because they’ll get a ton of great third party apps that do wonderful things with their data. (and yes I admit it’s a double-edged sword)

4. Hurry up with pages for brands.

It’s common knowledge that Google Plus is working on implementing pages for brands, which will be similar to Facebook Pages. I’d like to see these pages be much more easily surfaced and organized in Google Plus than they are with Facebook. I often find myself ‘liking’ a brand page on Facebook, then never coming across it again because it’s hidden away. Why can’t I put my favorite brand pages in my main Facebook menu? Why can’t I add it immediately to a list when I ‘like’ it (instead of having to manually go to the list and put the new Page into it, which is time consuming).

Google Plus has the opportunity to create much more user friendly brand pages, which will only benefit both users and brands.

5. Find a way to entice my family and non-geeky friends onto Google Plus.

This may be the most important challenge that Google Plus faces if it’s truly going to challenge Facebook. While Google Plus has a fervent base of early adopter users, it hasn’t managed to attract mainstream people yet. I don’t have any statistical proof of that, but you only need to look at who you’re interacting with on Google Plus. For me it’s all industry people, which makes for a great social network if you want to discuss work matters. That’s why Robert Scoble loves Google Plus so much.

So far only one of my family members is using Google Plus – my iPad 2-toting brother. And he’s using it mainly to make humorous references about the lack of people he knows on Google Plus. In contrast, all of my immediate family and a good portion of my extended family uses Facebook. Sure, it took years for them all to arrive there. But the point is, Google Plus needs to eventually find a way to entice them onto its service. Or maybe the fact that Google Plus will be such an intricate part of the future Google product line (search, e-commerce and so on) is what’s going to eventually get my family and others using Plus.

Those are 5 things I’d love to see from Google Plus, as soon as possible. I haven’t even mentioned the big complaint from recent weeks: Google Plus doesn’t allow people to select user names that aren’t their real names. This has been a controversial issue and it too needs to be resolved.

What else do you think Google Plus should do in order to keep the pressure on Facebook? And by the way, this ‘battle’ is great news for us consumers – as it forces both companies to give us what we’re clamoring for. And we won’t mind if a bit of bigco blood gets spilled in the process.

As many of you know, Microsoft has had a free 25 GB of cloud drive storage for some time with its Skydrive service. Now 4Shared.com is trying out to offer an alternative. You can have up to 15 GB of free storage, as long as you confirm your email account and don’t upload any files larger than 2 GB each. More storage without ads and removing the file size and other limits can be had for $10 a month, less if you purchase an annual contract.

The service works similarly to Box.net, Dropbox and other cloud file storage services. The news this week is that it now comes with applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices, along with a synch service for Windows users and a separate Mac desktop app too. You can set it up to post any uploads to both your Twitter and Orkut accounts.

4Shared is also making its API available to developers and is offering up $5000 prize each month to the developer “who most creatively utilizes the 4Shared virtual drive framework in their app,” according to the company. Now we here at ReadWriteWeb just give away a MacBook Air every month – there you actually get hard cash money, along with up to a million ad banner impressions promoting your app! One early winner is an app that allows one-tap backup of your iPhone contacts to the 4Shared cloud repository.

As many of you know, Microsoft has had a free 25 GB of cloud drive storage for some time with its Skydrive service. Now 4Shared.com is trying out to offer an alternative. You can have up to 15 GB of free storage, as long as you confirm your email account and don’t upload any files larger than 2 GB each. More storage without ads and removing the file size and other limits can be had for $10 a month, less if you purchase an annual contract.

The service works similarly to Box.net, Dropbox and other cloud file storage services. The news this week is that it now comes with applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices, along with a synch service for Windows users and a separate Mac desktop app too. You can set it up to post any uploads to both your Twitter and Orkut accounts.

4Shared is also making its API available to developers and is offering up $5000 prize each month to the developer “who most creatively utilizes the 4Shared virtual drive framework in their app,” according to the company. Now we here at ReadWriteWeb just give away a MacBook Air every month – there you actually get hard cash money, along with up to a million ad banner impressions promoting your app! One early winner is an app that allows one-tap backup of your iPhone contacts to the 4Shared cloud repository.

PhoneGap, the open source mobile developement framework that allows mobile developers build apps using Web standards, is launching today into version 1.0. This is a milestone release for the platform, which now adds additional APIs, features and improvements in its newly updated product.

The launch is being celebrated in Portland, at an event called PhoneGap Day held at Urban Airship, a company which just had some major news of its own. Champagne all around!

Mobile developers know PhoneGap as the platform that provides a way to build apps using HMTL, CSS and JavaScript, all of which are common Web standards. PhoneGap developers can use either the free open source framework or the newer PhoneGap Build service (beta) which returns apps for iOS, Android, webOS, Symbian, BlackBerry and soon, MeeGo and bada.

The open source code has been downloaded over 600,000 times, at a rate of around 40,000 times per month, says PhoneGap creator Nitrobi.

What’s New in PhoneGap 1.0?

With the launch of PhoneGap 1.0, the company says the focus was on accessing native device API’s.

Other improvements include:

• Overall API stability and “pluggable” architecture
• W3C DAP API compatibility
• Contacts API
• Remote debugging tools
• A new unifying bridge interface that makes adding platforms and platform extensions easy
• Improved plugin development processes

Most of the improvements to PhoneGap 1.0 came from its community of developers, which Nitobi CEO Andre Charland says is PhoneGap’s “greatest asset.” Contibuters include Nitobi, hundreds of indvidual developers and a team of senior software engineers at IBM. Adobe has also shown support for PhoneGap in its Dreamweaver software. Others, including Alcatel-Lucent, Sabre, Cisco, Logitech and Time Warner, have adopted it as well, Nitobi says.

PhoneGap 1.0 will be officially launched at this afternoon’s party, which will inlcude talks, device hands-on’s, demos and, of course, beer.

Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as our top social media and technology updates.

This month’s hot topic has been, without a doubt, Google+. Whether the new social service from the world’s largest search company will be a “Facebook killer” remains to be seen, but one thing’s for certain: This is one social network you don’t want to ignore.

When it comes to getting found, Google+ is fast becoming a great asset for bloggers and content producers thanks to its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools. In this post, we’ll show you a few ways to start spreading a little of that Google+ love on your WordPress-powered website.

Display Your Google+ Profile Information

Software developer John Henson from PlusDevs has developed a handy, easy to use WordPress widget that displays your Google+ profile on your blog. The setup is quick and simple: Install the plug-in and drag the widget into your sidebar. Just fill out the form and you’re done.

You can also incorporate the widget into your template with only a few lines of PHP code, giving you the flexibility to place it anywhere within your layout.

You can learn more about the widget in the official blog post or jump straight to the code on GitHub.

Unofficial Google+ user tracking site SocialStatistics.com also offers an embeddable Google+ widget. Simply add your profile to their database and grab the widget code from your page on their site.

Add the +1 Button

If you’re not already using the Google +1 button, consider taking a moment to add it to your site. This is a great way to let users save, promote and find their favorite content. The +1 button only takes a few minutes to integrate with your site and works with any Google profile. While this isn’t a Google+ specific feature, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it integrated with the service. Either way, it’s another great way of adding an additional avenue for promotion and sharing.

You can learn more about the +1 button from Google.

To add it to your WordPress site, you can either use the official +1 button code generator from Google or take a look at the myriad +1 button WordPress plug-ins available.

Use a Google+ Inspired Theme

Do you love the look of Google+’s clean, intuitive layout and unobtrusive interface? For the die-hard fan (or, hey, maybe you run a blog that’s centered around the service), there are already a few Google+ inspired WordPress themes for your perusal.

WP Plus

WP Plus is a fixed-width, 3 column Google+ inspred WordPress theme supporting custom content menus, styled sticky-posts and valid XHTML/CSS code. Clean, fast-loading and SEO optimized, WP Plus gives your blog the Google+ look and feel in just minutes.

PlusOne

Similar to WP Plus, PlusOne is another 3-column, fixed-width Google+ styled theme that supports custom WordPress menus. It’s a clean and well-designed theme, but it does take some liberties with how it translates Google+ to WordPress (so it doesn’t look quite as accurate to Google’s own design).

Reflex+

Reflex+ shares all of the features mentioned in the above two theme but it also brings in jQuery and incorporates AJAX for some tasks, such as the “read more” post navigation, helping it appear more fluid and seamless.

Want More?

Google+ is still a relatively new service locked behind an invite-only registration system. No doubt as time progresses and the service grows, there will be more options for publishers. Right now there are a couple of options if you’re a developer interested in having a go at creating your own Google+ plug-in.

If you’d like to gain access to the official Google+ API, you’ll need to sign up with Google to register interest in a Google+ developer account. Unfortunately, the API is not yet public. It’s unclear whether this will change as the service matures, but inquiring about developer access is certainly worth looking into if you want serious Google+ integration and sharing between your site and the service.

For a more portable (and presumably trimmed-down) solution, software developer Jason Striegel has put together a collection of PHP utilities for a locally-hosted Google+ API service. In its current state, the API will allow you to retrieve post and profile data and post to Google+. You can check out his code on GitHub. This is a great option to include within your own distributed code, such as WordPress plug-ins and widgets.

Earlier this month, entrepreneur and blogger Jesse Stay noticed that both Facebook and Twitter had completely removed support for RSS from of their websites. After much outcry from the tech community, Facebook relented and re-added an RSS link to Facebook Pages once again. Twitter, however, did nothing.

But now, one developer has taken it upon himself to build a tool that uses Twitter’s API (application programming interface) to create RSS feeds. The code, called “Twitter API 2 RSS,” is now available on GitHub here.

Twitter Kills RSS

According to Stay’s earlier post, Twitter has been moving away from RSS for some time. Last year, Twitter developer Isaac Hepworth told Stay that only hyperlinks to RSS feeds were being removed from Twitter profile pages, but links to the RSS in the Twitter metadata would remain. Their temporary removed was “accidental,” Hepworth had said, and would be fixed soon.

But Stay says the problem was never fixed, and he could not find any evidence of RSS in the HTML source, either. This lead him to conclude that Twitter had indeed killed off all support for the technology. An article in Twitter’s Help section confirmed this, saying: “we no longer directly support RSS feeds on Twitter.”

As Stay noted at the time, developers could access RSS through Twitter’s API, which may be the last recourse for getting an RSS feed from Twitter’s website, outside of third-party services.

Twitter API 2 RSS

Now another developer, Shawn McCollum, has done just that. Twitter API 2 RSS, available as a code snippet (aka a “gist” on GitHub), is now ready for testing, he says. The code was originally written for personal use when he wanted to build his own better-looking and more functional RSS feeds for Twitter profiles.

After McCollum heard that Twitter was removing RSS support, he realized that the same code could be retooled for use by others. The only problem now is that he does not know how to get past Twitter’s API limit of 150 calls per hour from a single IP address. He’s looking for ideas to help with that, if you want to pitch in.

In the meantime, technical users can host their own copy of Twitter API 2 RSS and then subscribe to the resulting feeds in Google Reader or any other RSS reader application. However, the code is not yet available as a service for end users at this time. Details on how to use the code are available here on McCollum’s blog.

Here’s what it looks like, in action:

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SMS is the ugly stepchild of mobile applications, but if you’re looking for a simple way to reach a huge swath of people, SMS is the way to go.

After all, smartphone penetration is still relatively low within the U.S. and global markets. And for some tasks, you might not need something as complicated as a native or mobile web application.

Perhaps you want to launch an autoresponder or send interactive outbound messages. Maybe you want to run an SMS-based marketing promotion or build a self-service app for customers. You could even set up a voting app à la American Idol.

SMS is a great way to reach a much larger consumer base with these kinds of simple messages. And due to the simple fact of technological evolution, building an SMS app has never been easier.

SMSified is a new and relatively easy way to build SMS apps with a REST API. The service provides an SMS gateway that works with the Big Four carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile) as well as Virgin Mobile and MetroPCS. Currently, SMSified apps work within the U.S. only.

The API allows for sending and receiving text messages via either short codes or ten-digit phone numbers. SMSified can also help devs with setting up short codes, a 90-day, $3,000 fee process.

The service uses a REST interface based on the GSMA OneAPI standard. It uses the HTTP POST method on the web server side to send and receive messages and notifications. You can get more info on the specifics in the documentation.

The service is currently in a beta period — during this time, all messages sent through SMSified are free. The company is also offering users a $20 credit to send and receive messages and test SMSified apps. When the beta and the credit run out, SMS messages cost $.01 each.

SMSified is made by Voxeo, a VoIP and IVR (that’s “interactive voice response”) company.

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As we announced at Google I/O, today we are releasing version 3.1 of the Android platform. Android 3.1 is an incremental release that builds on the tablet-optimized UI and features introduced in Android 3.0. It adds several new features for users and developers, including:

• Open Accessory API. This new API provides a way for Android applications to integrate and interact with a wide range of accessories such as musical equipment, exercise equipment, robotics systems, and many others.
• USB host API. On devices that support USB host mode, applications can now manage connected USB peripherals such as audio devices. input devices, communications devices, and more.
• Input from mice, joysticks, and gamepads. Android 3.1 extends the input event system to support a variety of new input sources and motion events such as from mice, trackballs, joysticks, gamepads, and others.
• Resizable Home screen widgets. Developers can now create Home screen widgets that are resizeable horizontally, vertically, or both.
• Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) Applications can now receive notifications when external cameras are attached and removed, manage files and storage on those devices, and transfer files and metadata to and from them.
• Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) API for audio. Developers can directly manage on-demand or interactive data streaming to enable VOIP, push-to-talk, conferencing, and audio streaming.

For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 3.1 Platform Highlights.

To make the Open Accessory API available to a wide variety of devices, we have backported it to Android 2.3.4 as an optional library. Nexus S is the first device to offer support for this feature. For developers, the 2.3.4 version of the Open Accessory API is available in the updated Google APIs Add-On.

Alongside the new platforms, we are releasing an update to the SDK Tools (r11).

Visit the Android Developers site for more information about Android 3.1, Android 2.3.4, and the updated SDK tools. To get started developing or testing on the new platforms, you can download them into your SDK using the Android SDK Manager.

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Learning to code is something every tech-minded person should try at least once — and the wealth of online courses, many of which are free or surprisingly inexpensive, make learning about programming easier than ever.

If you’re thinking of picking up C++, Ruby on Rails, Python or Java, these online options might be a good way to test the waters of programming before you fully invest your time and money in formal training or certifications. And if you’re a veteran programmer in need of resources for learning new languages, these sites might help you a bit, too.

One disadvantage of learning to code through an online platform is the lack of face-to-face interactions with an instructor. But don’t let that intimidate you — Google, Stack Overflow, and other online forums (even Twitter) are great ways to get help when your code won’t compile, you don’t understand a concept or you just get frustrated.

In the comments, let us know if you’ve found other great resources for learning about programming — or other sites for support and Q&A for newer developers.

UC Berkeley Webcast/Courses

The University of California at Berkeley has an extensive catalog of webcasts, including events and courses. The coursework is entirely free to access, and it includes video and audio webcasts of computer sciences classes from the current semester all the way back to 2003.

Mozilla’s School of Webcraft

Mozilla’s 100% free developer training site is all about teaching noobs and jedis alike how to code. If you want to get started coding with something like HTML or if you’re an experienced dev who wants to dive into Python, the School of Webcraft is something worth checking out. Several courses generally run simultaneously, and new classes are being drafted all the time.

Google Code University

From Google Code, we have the Code University, a free and fascinating resource. And of course, it has its own forums for learners to ask questions and get help. True beginners can also start out with the introductions and tutorials, which are designed with newer devs in mind.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare

If you’ve dreamed of studying computer science at one of the U.S.’s leading tech institutions, here’s your chance. MIT’s free and accessible courses are great for ambitious would-be coders. Check out the full list of courses for computer science, which include introductions to Java, Python, C++ and more.

The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

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