Users who visit the Google Knol start page see a big announcement on that page stating that “Knol will be moving to Annotum on May 1, 2012″. Google Knol was a Wikipedia-like online service to which Google users contributed articles to. Knol, unlike other services, can be migrated to Annotum, a multi-user WordPress site. Knol users alternatively have the option to download their articles to their computer.

Google Knol will be available until May 1, 2012. The service will be taken offline at this point in time. Knol users can still download or migrate their articles until October 1, 2012 when those options expire as well. Users who migrate will benefit from automatic redirects of their articles.

For Google Wave, the options are nearly the same. Google Wave will become read only on January 31, 2012 which basically means that users will not be able to create or edit waves after this point. Users have until April 30, 2012 to download the Wave data as PDF documents to their computers. There is also an option to export wave to an Open Source project called Workaround that is based on the Apache Wave code base.

Google Gears is deprecated and will no longer be available as of December 2011. The open source project allowed users to make and use web applications offline.

Other services that are discontinued include the Search Timeline feature which displayed a search term’s popularity over time in the search results, Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal which was an effort on Google’s part to drive down the costs of renewable energy, Friend Connect which could be used to add social features to web sites and Bookmark lists, which allowed users to share bookmarks.

Larry Page is hell-bent to slim-down Google’s operations. Getting rid of services that are not overly popular and concentrating on services that are may be a way to please share holders and make the company more profitable. These service discontinuations on the other hand can have an effect on the overall trust that users have in Google. Why would someone want to use a Google service that is not as popular as Gmail, if there is a chance that Google’s CEO will announce a fourth wave of retirements in the coming months.

To enable this feature you will need Google Gears, which will download some stuff for you, then off you go, you can view your calendar offline. Sadly you can only view your calendar at the moment, you won’t be able to edit or add events. I imagine they will be adding this soon, I would think this only requires some simple syncing.

Until then, you have full viewing access to your calendar, and you can use Google Gears with many sites, like Remember The Milk, Google Reader, Zoho Writer, and more. Do you know any other cool sites that work with Google Gears? Let us know, perhaps in the future we can download the whole internet and use it at home!

Offline Gmail is an interesting option for users who do not want to (or cannot) install a desktop client on their computer. Everyone else is probably better of using desktop clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or The Bat which provide many advanced features and usage scenarios that web email clients do not offer.

It should also be noted that Google Gears has to be installed on the computer to make use of the offline Gmail extension. Google Gears is currently only available for Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Is the buzz about the new experimental Gmail feature justified? It is highly limited at this point in time and does not come with any features that cannot be achieved otherwise. It might be nice for users who like to use Gmail and do not want the troubles of installing a desktop email client. What’s your take on it?

Bubbles is a Windows only ‘browser’ which lets you create site specific ‘bubbles’ to run in the system tray.

It can actually be very useful for any web service you find yourself constantly using, but as of yet has no kind of desktop access. SlimTimer was designed to take advantage of it specifically, but it works pretty well with a lot of other websites as well.

Really it’s just the fact you can minimise these ‘bubbles’ to the system tray which makes it useful for me, if it wasn’t for that then you can get a lot of the functionality through other means.

The problem is a lot of the Bubbles functionality overlaps what other programs I use already do, but that might not be the case for you.

It does have some useful extensions such as notifications for Google services like Google Reader, Gmail and Facebook. You can also drag and drop photos to be uploaded to Flickr, a handy one if this is a service you use.

Personally I don’t know how this is going to compete against technologies such as Adobe AIR and Google Gears and maybe even Mozilla Prism. However the simplicity of Bubbles may be its strong point, and plenty of developer tools and resources are provided on the site.

Do any of you use this?

Google Gears is one year old now, and although we haven’t seen a huge adoption across the web, it is extremely useful if you use any of the Google services likes Docs, Reader, Calendar and Gmail.

I’m finding myself using Docs increasingly over the last few weeks and I really need access to my files offline, unfortunately Google Gears is officially only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. I presumed the Firefox extension would work for Flock as it’s built on the Firefox code base, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Luckily a quick Google later and I found Martin over at capcloud discovered converting the Firefox Gears extensions into a Flock extension to be fairly simple:

Following the instructions that I found on the Google Gears Google Group, I repackaged Google Gears as a Flock extension. (The only other converted Gears extension that I found seems to be for OS X.)

You can install the extension by clicking here.

Once you have downloaded this simply use Flock to open the file and it should install just like a normal extension.

Martin only just updated this on April the 24th, so there should be no reason for it not to work.

Hope you find it useful!