Google gives Buzz the axe

Google announced Friday that it will shutdown its Google Buzz social network. In a blog post, the company said it was making the move in order to focus on the more recently launched Google+.

"We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+," Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz said in the blog post on Google's company blog. 

The Associated Press reports that the 20-month-old Buzz "is destined to be remembered as Google's botched attempt to build a social networking service to rival Facebook's." Google+, which launched in June, has seen more success. According to PC World, Google+ is up to 40 million members.

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MSNBC reports that Buzz "was a costly effort for Google, in more ways than one." The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit for privacy violations related to Buzz, which faced complaints about the way it potentially exposed users' Gmail contacts. The company eventually agreed to set up a $8.5 million fund that will go primarily to Internet privacy and policy organizations.

Other changes announced by Google Friday include shutting down Code Search "which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web" and University Research Program for Google Search "which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers."