Quite a list of products.
Imagine announcing and developing something then just killing it off (or buying it and killing it off). All without any public discussion, no user input for most of these decisions.
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A bunch of that stuff wasn’t killed and lives on under different names/generations of product. That’s not that they don’t kill stuff (sometimes apparently randomly) but Pixel became Pixel 2 which became PixelBook, Nexus (indirectly) became the pixel phones, that kind of thing.
Sure. Why not.
This site would be more interesting if it had brief bios of key people involved in each project and what they went on to do, either inside or outside of Google.
For example, I’m sure some of the people involved in Wave were involved later on with Google Docs, because a lot of the functionality pioneered in Wave made it’s way over to Docs.
And I note Dodgeball is listed - I would say Google 100% dropped the (dodge)ball on that one, because Dennis Crowley, the lead dev, left Google and founded Foursquare, which is now a very impressive company powering a huge amount of location based stuff on the web. The consumer version of Foursquare (now known as Swarm) had some bumpy roads, but in large part is the original vision of Dodgeball.
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There was a great special edition episode of the vergecast where they interview the CEO of foursquare about their pivot to B2B it’s really interesting!
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This one hurt, thank God for Feedly.
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Foursquare still exists, wow.
I remember that app… I knew loads of people that used it for location then they did an update that made it into some kind of whatsapp clone and removed the checkin functionality, so most people including me just uninstalled it and went on with their lives - it was the textbook example of ‘marketing’ ruining an app at the time, although given that facebook and google both have that kind of stuff (although not the competitive bit of becoming ‘mayor’ of your local cafe) perhaps long term they had no choice.
Seems like they went corporate & survived. I guess that’s a success story.
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Indeed. I loved Reader, but I love Feedly more.
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Really interesting website.
Although I do agree with @TonyHoyle that the vast majority of the projects listed have either been rebranded/replaced by a similar product or combined with another product.
I also think the length of the list is indicative of Google’s willingness to try different things as well as their intention to continually evolve and replace stuff which isn’t working.
I love and still use Picasa, still functions better than most software of similar nature
After this, they brought back check-ins, mayorships and badges, but split them out into a separate consumer app called Swarm.
Most of their revenue definitely comes from the business side of things though. You’d be surprised at how many companies use Foursquare’s location data.
Presumably, getting the public to populate Foursquare with all that lovely location data for free was the whole point all along, though?
This brought back memories. I used to love the mayoral bragging rights.