Google giving up on Wave, Knol and Friend Connect

Google keeps whittling down its projects, narrowing the focus of the company's efforts behind Chief Executive Larry Page's push to put "more wood behind fewer arrows."

The latest trimming will eliminate seven Google products: Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears, Search Timeline, Wave, Knol and the ambitious project Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

"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," Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of operations, said in a company blog post.  "Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience."

Here's the rundown on each discontinued product from Hölzle's post:

Google Buzz introduced to Gmail

We've blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we've taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you're up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today's world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it's increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting