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posted by n1 on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the b-sides-and-rarities dept.

Quentin Hugon, Benjamin Benoit and Damien Leloup have created a memorial page for projects adandoned by Google over the years including: Google Answers, Lively, Reader, Deskbar, Click-to-Call, Writely, Hello, Send to Phone, Audio Ads, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Ride Finder, Shared Stuff, Page Creator, Marratech, Goog-411, Google Labs, Google Buzz, Powermeter, Real Estate, Google Directory, Google Sets, Fast Flip, Image Labeler, Aardvark, Google Gears, Google Bookmarks, Google Notebook, Google Code Search, News Badges, Google Related, Latitude, Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Health, Knol, One Pass, Listen, Slide, Building Maker, Meebo, Talk, SMS, iGoogle, Schemer, Notifier, Orkut, Hotpot, Music Trends, Refine, SearchWiki, US Government Search, Sparrow, Web Accelerator, Google Accelerator, Accessible Search, Google Video, and Helpouts. Missing from the list that we remember are Friend Connect, Google Radio Ads, Jaiku, SideWiki, and Wave.

We knew there were a lot, but who knew there'd be so many. Which abandoned Google project do you wish were still around?

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  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:22AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:22AM (#154050)

    I use GMail at work, but I'd always used Google Talk for the messaging, not the GMail interface. Having an actual program, not just a frame in a tab in a browser, makes a huge difference for me.

    They finally shut down the servers for it last week. I'm still looking for a replacement.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:02AM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:02AM (#154056) Journal

      The replacement is Hangouts, which runs as a Chrome Plugin. It can do file transfer video calls, yadda yadda. But you will have chrome running in the Background all the time.

      However, Google Talk servers, which are just Jabber, are still running. And they said they have no intention of shutting them down anytime soon. You can use any xmpp client with your google account. I use Pigeon on linux/bsd, and Xabber on linux.

      Its not my favorite xmpp server, because their presence reporting is flaky. But anything sent from any jabber client does arrive on Hangouts, and vice versa. But hangouts has no clue about OTR conversations, but then neither did Google Talk.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 1) by macson_g on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:38AM

    by macson_g (4848) on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:38AM (#154055)

    I still miss it. I tried few alternatives, but nothing came close.

    • (Score: 1) by f4r on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:33AM

      by f4r (4515) on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:33AM (#154063)
      I missed it sorely too, but then I found Sage (an RSS extension for firefox) and I feel it fills the gap nicely, in some ways it's even better even. Bit of a change in terms of behavior/flow, and RSS does have limitations, but for me it worked.
      --
      Do not use as directed.
    • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:26AM

      by mtrycz (60) on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:26AM (#154090)

      Sooner or later I'll make a fortune out of an iGoogle-like interface, made with something like gridster, maybe? As soon as I get myself to move my lazy ass off the couch :)

      My Sysadmins could use a better interface for their monitoring software too. So many opportunities, so little time...

      --
      In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
  • (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:04AM

    by SlimmPickens (1056) on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:04AM (#154057)

    I thought wave had real potential. It wasn't quite right but it solved many of the problems with email.

    • (Score: 1) by magamo on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:15AM

      by magamo (3037) on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:15AM (#154088)

      Wave was picked up as an apache project:
      http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ [apache.org]

      • (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:23AM

        by SlimmPickens (1056) on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:23AM (#154098)

        Yeh I checked it for a few years. Nothing but a dusty skeleton in there.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:35AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:35AM (#154340)

          That's the case with most Apache projects. Apache is where dead software goes to die even more.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:14AM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:14AM (#154058) Journal

    I've found replacements for them.

    What I worry about is overtime I find a google project that seems to have promise, I have to think about just how much effort I want to put into using it, knowing that it might be the next on the chopping block.

    Now they want me to join Inbox, (no, not going there), last year they kept bugging me about Google+, (nope).

    Now I hear Google+ has a new boss, and might be getting a haircut.

    I'm moving off of Google Drive as well. Its a great place to store big PDF manuals and such. But nothing that isn't already in the public domain.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:55AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:55AM (#154075) Journal

      You can't trust external resources. It's simple as that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:58AM (#154077)

    they were quite useful.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by datapharmer on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:57AM

      by datapharmer (2702) on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:57AM (#154085)

      They gathered enough data... these services were just there to get a training set of data for voice recognition algorithms. Once they had a sufficient sample size they didn't need to offer them anymore. It was good for training data because it was relatively structured data (business and city names, addresses, etc) but allowed them to gather a variety of phonetics and accents.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:01AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:01AM (#154078) Journal

    The individual reason that made these projects fail would be interesting to read about. A business case analytics.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:07AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:07AM (#154080) Journal

    I miss "Don't be evil". Loved it when Micro$erft (extra mutation just for the fanbois) said they disagreed. If only Google could bring it back. Please? And no, you do not need my location to respond to this request. Wow, there shouldn't be a star right there. It's getting brighter! Hey, that's no star, it's a . . . .

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:35AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:35AM (#154094) Homepage
    Which was strangely not on the list, clearly they didn't use google lists to generate it!
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:50AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:50AM (#154101) Homepage
      Hmmm, maybe Lists was actuall called Sets, and indeed that's listed in the set of abandoned projects, my apologies.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:06AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:06AM (#154095) Homepage Journal

    I can see how it can be appealing to have someone else take care of your computing needs, rather than to hire staff and buy hardware to take care of it yourself.

    But if your business depends on something that you put on The Cloud, and The Cloud's vendor doesn't regard it as profitable anymore, or goes bankrupt, or feels the need to alter the service in a way you don't find helpful, you're pretty much SOL.

    When I apply for jobs I am often asked for my GitHub account. While strictly speaking I do have one, I don't use it. When I want to release source, I post a tarball on my own website. I'm getting ready to release the source to my iOS App as Free Software; when i do I'll set up my own git server, at my own domain.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:54PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:54PM (#154218)

      I've worked on both sides at cloud-ish providers and cloud customer and I assure you WRT support and reliability you're not worth a penny more than their median cost of sales to replace you. If thats free or $5 you're in big trouble when things go wrong. Which they eventually will.

      Lets say you're a company who's lifeblood is email, core part of your revenue generation (not spam, I was thinking of a specific technical translation services company) and your cloud email provider whom you pay $19/mon isn't working, you won't get a penny more than $19/mon of service or reliability.

      This is why some little company pays a sysadmin $90K/yr for email... its not that providing email costs $90K when everything is working, its that the revenue hit of email being down greatly exceeds $90K/yr and they get "more than" $90K/yr of service, repair, and responsiveness.

      And this is the core problem with SaaS or cloud or whatever buzzword of the week.

  • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Saturday March 07 2015, @12:18PM

    by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Saturday March 07 2015, @12:18PM (#154104) Journal

    Is it not interesting to observe a real-world example of Sturgeon's revelation? Sad to see "don't be evil" numbered among the things considered as crap. It also makes entrepreneurship appear even more frightening.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:59PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:59PM (#154220)

    Its useful beyond performance art because the list is so huge and growing so fast. I didn't know "send to phone" and schemer were already dead.

    I miss igoogle and having it display a live-ish /. rss feed (seriously was amazing) and I miss reader although newsblur is better (and I'm gladly paying for it)

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:44PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:44PM (#154237) Homepage

    None of them. Any Google product will always be at risk of being abandoned and its users scrambling to recover. I'm not a big fan of putting myself at the mercy of a third party, especially one with such a laissez faire attitude toward cutting features and products.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 2) by Teckla on Sunday March 08 2015, @03:29PM

      by Teckla (3812) on Sunday March 08 2015, @03:29PM (#154463)

      Any Google product will always be at risk of being abandoned and its users scrambling to recover.

      Users scrambling to recover? So far, Google has always given plenty of notice when products will be discontinued.

  • (Score: 1) by Clev on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:05AM

    by Clev (2946) on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:05AM (#154307)
    Another superior product that was bought by Google and then killed to force contented users to switch to an inferior service (Google Apps.)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @05:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @05:01PM (#154516)

    kind of surprised no one seems to remember this