The spring cleaning continues for Cisco Systems. We’re hearing rumors that the San Jose, Calif.-based company is shutting down its Eos social publishing platform as part of its ongoing restructuring.

Indeed, the Eos closure has been an open secret for several weeks now, since the April 12th resignation of the department’s head Dan Scheinman. Scheinman told me in an interview today that while he’s proud of what Eos achieved technically, “the economics weren’t what we wanted, given Cisco’s larger situation.”

Cisco has yet to definitively confirm the closure, other than to say it’s “evaluating other market opportunities” for Eos and its technology. As of press time, the Eos website is still up and running, although the product’s Twitter page has been deleted.

Eos was aimed at helping media and entertainment companies to create websites and social networking features. The platform, which counted Warner Music Group as a major customer, was born out of Cisco’s 2007 acquisition of white-label social networking startup Five Across.

While Eos was by all accounts a very cool service, shuttering it is a smart move from a corporate strategy perspective. As evidence by the closure last month of its Flip business unit, the cool factor is no longer enough to keep a product in Cisco’s good graces. Cisco currently has all hands on deck in an effort to regain an edge in its core networking business, and non-core products such as Eos and Flip are some of the most obvious assets that need to be dumped.

No word yet on whether Cisco will sell off the Eos assets or just shut down the unit. We’ve reached out to the company for confirmation on the closure and more details, and will update this post when we receive a response.

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The deadline to remove videos comes as Cisco is in the midst of reorganizing, shuttering consumer-facing businesses and returning its focus to the enterprise networking segment. The Flip video camera business was just one unit that fell victim to the cuts, as Cisco announced it would shut down the popular consumer video camera manufacturer last month.

Even though Cisco is hastily moving to wind down the business, 30 days isn’t a very long time for consumers to move files from a service like this. Last month, for instance, Google announced it would finally be shutting down its Google Video site to focus on its wildly more popular YouTube service. On April 13, the search giant announced that it would end playback of Google Video files by the end of the month, and gave users 30 days to manually download those files. But despite Google Video lying mostly dormant for several years, users protested the sudden shutdown. Google eventually backpedaled, eliminating the April 29 shutdown date and urging users to transfer their files to YouTube instead.

One of the key advantages of the FlipShare service was semi-private sharing of videos; users that uploaded to FlipShare primarily did so because they could share within a small group of friends and family without posting them for all the world to see. For users that still want their files hosted on the web but don’t necessarily want them viewable by everyone, YouTube offers private viewing controls so that videos can go unlisted on the main site, or will only be available with those who have a shareable link. Shutterfly  and Vimeo  also enable viewers to upload videos and privately share them.

While users will have just 30 days to download files from the FlipShare website, Cisco will continue to support the Flip camera hardware and software for another 18 months. On the Flip website, the company reports it will continue to offer technical support for Flip cameras until Dec. 31, 2013, and the cameras themselves will continue to be available while supplies last. It also said that the FlipShare software will continue to be supported until the end of 2013 as well.

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“What was good for Flip and the Flip team is not the same for Cisco’s shareholders,” he observed, declining to speculate on why Cisco changed its attitudes towards the consumer. When asked to explain why Cisco killed the Flip, he pointed out that it was part of Cisco’s overall strategy but he couldn’t comment on why Cisco had done it, since he no longer worked for the company. Kaplan said that the Flip brand is still very strong, and he has received thousands of emails from Flip owners wondering about Flip’s future.

Kaplan said he doesn’t know, but at the same time he said that he doesn’t believe that the smartphone is killing the Flip. “Cellphones will take high quality photos and videos but they are a different use case and billions of dollars can be generated in revenues from single purpose devices,” he added. They are both different use-case scenarios.

Hoever, from my perspective, in order for a device to thrive in today’s crowded marketplace it needs to have connectivity — that connection drives engagement and with it, attachment to the device. Any device that can in turn take that engagement and establish itself as a platform can reap many millions in profits.  I outlined this theory in my post last month.

And that was perhaps the most glaring shortcoming of the Flip, an affordable, iconic video recorder that was such a rage that Cisco Systems paid $590 million for Pure Digital, the company behind the Flip.

When I asked Kaplan about the lack-of-connectivity being a problem, he disagreed. “We are San Francisco-based consumers and as a result we are a few years ahead of the market,” he said. But that’s a minority share of the overall market. In five years, he agreed most devices would have a connection to the network, but for now there remains a huge demand for single-purpose devices, especially the Flip.

Kaplan, left Cisco two months ago and is currently working on a new start-up that is around the concept of “memories.” He declined to share any details and he also declined to comment on any questions about him buying back Flip from Cisco. It would be cool, if he did – I still love my Flip.

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More than maybe any other product of its time, the Flip video camera helped to democratize the creation and distribution of personal videos. The product had a very simple value proposition: Not only was shooting video drop-dead easy, but it was also incredibly inexpensive. At less than $200, Flip cams became sought-after Christmas and birthday presents.

Those gifts sparked a new phenomenon of sharing personal videos online. Consider, for instance, what YouTube would have been without the ease with which Flip users could shoot, import and upload their videos to the site. Facebook, too, has benefited from the growth of video viewing that happens on its social network, and Flip videos were no doubt a large part of that.

But Pure Digital was unable to build on its early success in the personal video camera segment. One could argue that the death of the Flip cam was an inevitability, that even if the product hadn’t languished under Cisco’s direction that eventually the concept of a standalone video camera would lose out to video capabilities added to new smartphones and to more powerful video functionality sneaking into digital still cameras.

The real problem, though, is that as the market matured, the Flip cam didn’t. It added a new HD line, but other than an improvement in video quality, Pure Digital and Cisco did little to improve the product line over the years. For all its networking prowess, Cisco never made the leap to add any sort of wireless chip into the camera products, a move that most saw as a no-brainer. Unlike smartphones, there was no way to easily share Flip videos directly to the web.

Furthermore, Flip wasn’t able to capitalize on its user base and build useful services to coincide with the hardware. Clearly, Flip users wanted to share their videos with friends, but its video platform and destination site were a failure. Despite the fact that Flip’s video editing software and FlipShare sharing site were included with the camera by default, many users preferred to use third-party software for importing and editing their videos. And YouTube and Facebook were the go-to places to upload videos once they made their way onto the PC. In other words, its software and web presence never lived up to its hardware design.

All that said, it’s difficult to believe that Cisco is just cutting its losses and shutting Flip down. One would think that even if Cisco no longer found Flip valuable as part of its narrowing consumer strategy, it would be able to find a buyer interested in the Flip assets and Pure Digital personnel. With today’s announcement, Cisco has marked not just the end of a once-popular consumer product, but the end of an era.

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Cisco said it will close the Flip business, but will continue to support current Flipshare customers who upload and share media to the web. Cisco said it will also refocus its Home Networking business to make it more profitable and connected to the company’s networking infrastructure. It will also move Umi, its consumer Telepresence, into the business Telepresence line and sell it through an enterprise and service provider go-to-market model.

“We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,” CEO John Chambers said in a statement. “As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network’s ability to deliver on those offerings.”

The closure of the Flip unit comes a couple months after former Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan left Cisco, prompting questions about the direction of the Flip line of video cameras. Cisco bought Pure in March of 2009, saying the purchase was about extending its presence into the consumer electronics business. The company was also looking to use Pure’s smarts in simple consumer electronics design to rework its home networking business. While the deal has helped Cisco create a new line of more consumer friendly home routers, it didn’t really change the company much, a task that Om mentioned recently is incredibly hard for large companies. And it hasn’t resulted in a big revenue driver in video cam sales.

That’s because while Flip grew fast with its single purpose design, which managed to move millions of units, its continued growth was checked by the rise of smartphones that can increasingly shoot HD video while offering more wireless sharing options, something Flip’s camera’s never included, an irony for a networking company. Another new consumer business, Umi, a home video conferencing product, has also failed to capture a lot of buzz, in part because of its high price. With Kaplan headed toward the door, we speculated that the deal for Pure had turned into a flop.

Now it appears that Cisco is making that conclusion official. CEO John Chambers earlier this month laid out a major reorganization for the company in a memo to employees outlining how the company would refocus on five areas: core routing, switching and services; collaboration; architectures; and video. While Chambers said Cisco would still focus on video, it appears he was not referring to Flip. This deals a major blow to the idea of a single-purpose simple video cam, which may still have a niche place in the market. But while Cisco jettisons Flip, and admits defeat, the move shows the company is clearly serious about retrenching and getting back to basics.

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While many were left scratching their heads about why Cisco would buy a low-end camera maker, the company has always positioned the acquisition as one that got it more than just the Flip camera line. Cisco saw the deal as something that would help revitalize its consumer product line by injecting the design aesthetic and consumer marketing prowess of the Flip team directly into its products. That was supposed to help it move beyond the world of routers and gateways and deeper into the consumer space, a move that it has had trouble making, even as the home networking market matured.

Due to the belief that Pure Digital could reinvent Cisco’s consumer business, it paid a king’s ransom for the company to essentially buy the management team that led a small 100-person startup to create a new product category in handheld video. The thinking was that if Kaplan and Co. could simplify video, they could also help simplify the home network.

But now that Kaplan is veering toward an exit, it’s time to ask if the investment in Flip — and particularly in Kaplan — was worth the big chunk of change that Cisco put up?

In order to answer that, you have to look at what Kaplan helped accomplish in his two years. For the Cisco consumer-networking business, he shook up a product line that had grown somewhat stale by introducing Valet and its simplified software layer for setup and management, and an improved look and feel that makes the gear appear, on the surface at least, more approachable than the traditional Linksys line.

The thinking here is logical, because Cisco needed to take a different approach to moving beyond its core tech-savvy audience. Home networking had become a saturated market, one where most who wanted a home router had one, and the only way to further penetrate the last 30-40 percent or so without a home router in their home it would take a gentler, less-technology centric approach.

At the same time, Cisco wanted to leverage the Flip brand and give it additional fuel. The problem was (and is) is that the continued growth of video-enabled smartphones has hurt standalone cameras to a certain extent. While Flip cameras continue to do well — shipping 4 million total units as of Spring 2010 — they haven’t really seen the hockey-stick like growth of a true consumer technology phenomenon.

And while Cisco is positioning Kaplan’s departure as natural for the entrepreneur that he is, the company has to be disappointed he didn’t do more in his time there. The truth of the matter is that the Flip team was given free rein with Cisco’s consumer business, and while it has launched a new, friendlier line of home networking gear and continues to add minor enhancements to the Flip line, these aren’t the kind of earth-shaking remakes you pay that kind of money for.

In fact, two years after the deal, Cisco’s consumer business still feels, in some ways, like it is being left behind in a new digital home where Google and Apple are beginning to lay down stakes. Umi – its consumer video conferencing business and big focus for 2011 — seems to have a pricing problem, and despite the big hullabaloo the company made at CES over Videoscape – its integrated pay TV/OTT solution — most of the heat in the new digital home is still around others.

So while Kaplan and team have made some small steps towards resetting Cisco’s legacy product lines and continued to sell low-end cameras despite competition from Apple, for the amount of money Cisco paid, and with Kaplan ending tenure at the networking giant, the acquisition of Flip will go down in the books for some as a flop.

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The addition of Wi-Fi will would be a nice touch for the video camera, and an appropriate marriage with parent company Cisco’s networking tech. (Perhaps the Wi-Fi will even tie into the mysterious forthcoming Flip set-top box.) But the bigger question plaguing the entire Flip line is just how much life is left in a standalone product. Decent video-recording capabilities are being embedded in phones like the Droid, iPhone and iPod Nano. As we learned earlier this year, the video quality of the Nano doesn’t quite match up to the Flip cam yet, but that’s a big yet. Will people want to carry around a dedicated video camera when their phone will do just fine for capturing spontaneous moments?

When we’ve spoken with Flip reps in the past they’ve put on a brave face and said that there is enough room for lots of players in the space, but it’s hard to believe that. With multipurpose devices getting better at shooting video and the high-end HD cameras dropping in price, the better-than-good-but-not-great Flips are getting squeezed out.

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From the looks of it, the set-up has three components: a box you plug into your TV, a remote control and a USB stick. Plug the USB stick into your computer and the box into your TV (via composite or HDMI) and wirelessly stream recorded video to your television. No other details, such as a ship date or pricing, were included. When we contacted Cisco for comment, a rep emailed us with:

We do not comment on alleged products coming to market. As with all our products, we will announce through proper disclosure channels when products are ready and available to our customers.

Granted, we know next to nothing about this supposed box, but it seems clumsy for the usually elegant Flip line. And while this product appears to be targeting families that want to share video easily and may not want to upload it to the Internet, do people really want yet another box under their TV for the sole purpose of watching home movies? Plus any simplicity you gain from not uploading is essentially lost when you have to use two separate devices. It would be cool to see Flip develop its own Roku channel and eliminate the extra set-top hardware. We’ll see if a formal announcement comes in time for the holiday season.

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First, Liz walks you through the basics of the new nano. In a nutshell: odd camera placements ruin the otherwise svelte package that’s perfect for any pocket.

We got the new nano while at our sold-out GigaOM Mobilize conference earlier this week. I always have my Flip on me, so we pressed the two next to each other and shot some outdoor, indoor, quiet, noisy footage. (Note: the audio from this comparison is only from the nano, not from the Flip, mixing the two was getting too complicated in the editing). Overall — the Flip offered a MUCH better picture both indoor and out, providing way more detail in the image. The Flip microphone was also a little more discerning in our test, able to distinguish our subject’s voice in a crowded room much better than the Nano. (Update: I was remiss in pointing out earlier that I was using a Flip Ultra SD.)

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