Google plans to shut down its Buzz service within the next few weeks.

“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+,” Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of product, wrote on The Official Google Blog. “We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.”

Buzz was unveiled with great fanfare 20 months ago (launched in February 2010) as Google’s social networking alternative to Facebook. But Buzz quickly got into trouble because Google tied it to its email service in a way that automatically exposed users’ contact lists. Many people didn’t like the idea of having their most frequent email recipients shared without explicit permission.

Google is now focusing its social networking efforts on Google Plus, a 3 month-old service that has been warmly received.

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