Google Health, a free service that stores your personal health information, will end January 1, 2012. All its data available for download for a year following the shutdown. PowerMeter, another free tool that helps monitor your home energy usage, will end September 16, 2011.
The company says it will attempt to make it simple for people to gather their data stored on these services and transition to other, similar services.
Currently, users can grab their Google Health data as a PDF, HTML file, ZIP file or in one of several formats. Also, Google will soon allow users to "directly transfer your health data to other services that support the Direct Project protocol, an emerging open standard for efficient health data exchange." PowerMeter data will be available only as a CSV file for current PowerMeter users.
"While they didn't scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult," wrote Aaron Brown, Google senior project manager, in an official blog post.
"By helping people make more informed decisions through greater access to more information, we believe Google Health and PowerMeter have been trailblazers in their respective categories," Brown added. "Ultimately though, we want to satisfy the most pressing needs for the greatest number of people. In the case of these two products, our inability to scale has led us to focus our priorities elsewhere."