Google To Start Killing Pet Projects?

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Google is getting set to scale back. Following up on a report by The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Alley Insider detailed some areas that Google might cut back on first. As they noted:

Shutting off services. Search sandbox SearchMash, virtual world Lively and Google Page Creator will soon be gone. Google Audio Indexing and Google Notebook could follow.
While there may be growing enthusiasm in shifting resources and repositories to the cloud, might a danger be looming?