If you have any videos hosted on Google Video, you may want to download them and upload them again on YouTube. Google Video is shutting down on April 29th, the same day that Google is ending the Tags service. Google stopped allowing videos from being uploaded to Videos in May 2009. Google Video first launched in 2005 and Google ended up acquiring YouTube in October 2006. Below is the letter that Google is sending to Videos users:

A boy with down syndrome that was at the center of a lawsuit in a trial against several Google executives withdrew from a lawsuit.  He withdrew from the case this past Wednesday.  However the trial will continue as Judge Oscar Magi accepted the role of the plaintiff.  The judge will be representing the interests of people suffering from Down syndrome.

The Milan city council met for a second session on Wednesday.  The trial will be postponed until March 17 without hearing arguments.  The four Google executives involved in this case is David Drummond (Google SVP and chief legal officer), George Reyes (former Google CFO), Peter Fleischer (Google Global Privacy Counsel), and Arvind Desikan (former Google Video head in London).

The boy decided to withdraw from the lawsuit because it was not in his best interests to proceed.  Michela Malerba, Google’s lawyer also expressed regret about what happened.

“The decision to withdraw from the case has been taken because Google officials have not only expressed their solidarity over what happened but have also taken concrete actions that show their sensitivity to the problems of handicapped people and the grave problem of bullying,” stated Malerba.

The lawsuit is over a video that was uploaded to Google Video.  The video uploaded in 2006 had four kids making fun of a boy with Down’s syndrome.

“The agreement between the boy’s family and Google was a surprise to me,” stated Guido Camera, a lawyer that represents that Vivi Down association.  “No one knows the details of the agreement, but if the family of this unfortunate boy has received compensation, then I’m happy.”

[via PC World]

Google has announced that they will not be supporting several of their services any longer.  This includes Google Video Uploads, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Mashup Editor.  The search engine company is shutting down the aforementioned services in order to keep efforts focused on core products and services.

Google Video blog post written by Michael Cohen: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service. “  Google Video will just become another video search engine and I’m assuming anyone that wants to upload videos will be routed to YouTube.

Google Catalog Search blog post written by Punit Soni: “In recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow [January 15, 2009], we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”  Google Catalog Search started in 2001 using OCR to search text of product catelogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Google Notebook blog post written by Raj Krishnan: “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up.”  Although Google Notebook will no longer be supported, they recommend using other Notebook-like services such as SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in GMail, and Google Bookmarks.

Google Code blog post written by Vic Gundotra: “As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License.”  Dodgeball will be discontinued in the next couple of months.  And the Mashup Editor will be shutting down in favor of the App Engine infrastructure.

Regretfully due to economic conditions, Google had to lay off a large number of contractors and about 100 recruiters.  Google has also had to relocate engineers from external offices to headquarters at Mountain View, California.

“Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core,” stated Alan Eustace on The Google Blog.

The economy as a whole has created turbulent times for the search engine company, but rest assured I expect them to bounce back as we see start seeing changes on Capitol Hill.