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Google eats social bookmarking sideline

More fat trimming

As it continues to cut costs, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory will soon shutter Google Shared Stuff, an attempt at so-called social bookmarking.

Google Shared Stuff was launched in September 2007, after so many navel-gazing net mavens had turned their attentions to Delicious and other sites that share your browser bookmarks with world+dog. And according to a brief notice from Google, the service will shutdown on March 30. In classic Google fashion, it never lost its beta tag.

Google still offers a Web 1.0 bookmarking service, known - appropriately enough - as Google Bookmarks. And Google says that if you still want to share stuff with the world, you should use the "share" below each YouTube video.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo! in December 2005 for a reported $30m to $40m, and it's still beloved by certain segment of the Web 2.0-obsessed digerati. Working to cut its own fat, Yahoo! recently axed its homegrown bookmarking service, MyWeb.

In recent weeks, Google has buried both its struggling newspaper and radio ads programs. And last month, it said it would murder or semi-murder Google Catalog Search, Google Video, Google Notebook, Google Dodgeball, and Google Mashup Editor - not to mention Jaiku, the Twitter rival it paid $12m for in October 2007.

During Google's latest earnings call, CEO Eric Schmidt said the company now has a "tight control over costs," admitting this had "eluded us perhaps in the past." ®

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