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Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

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Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#141

Post by smacktoward »

frik wrote: post #135
wozniacki wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Desktop Search - even from a cursory glance at the comments in this thread and the absence of its mention - is by far the most under-appreciated Google product ever. That sucker was good. Great even. It would find things across browsers, through documents and files and even collate results from web searches that most browsers - sometimes even Chrome to this day - missed or never registered in the history, in t…

Google desktop search was great. At the high of the desktop search engine race , it competed with OSX Spotlight and Windows desktop search (and various others like Yahoo X11, Copernic desktop search). Google worked on 3 major OS and run on a local web server. It looked like a local Google search and indexed various file formats incl. iFilter support. As basically all companies stopped further developing desktop searc…

I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

If this were Reddit, this is the point where I would post the "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" image.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#142

Post by maaku »

Slackwise wrote: post #96
onion2k wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Wave was a collaborative editor. It was nothing like Slack or HipChat (unless I've managed to really misunderstand Slack despite building a few things on top of it). It's problem was that it didn't have a purpose - no one really knew what to do with it because a "Wave" was presented an amorphous blob of "knowledge" that people could contribute to at the same time. It was an online notepad, sketchbook, and spre…

Google Wave was an XMPP-based protocol¹. It allowed communication and collaboration with revisioning. It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app. Wave.google.com was an example product using said protocol. Since the protocol was barely spoken of, even by developers, everyone assumed the website was the (only) product. Since the…

> It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

You mean like google docs?

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#143

Post by SixSigma »

und3rw4t3rp00ps wrote: post #33
Navarr wrote: post #2

I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects. Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul. There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them. Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the…

To me, this is evidence of Google's rather awkward relationship with consumers (i.e. they toss tons of branded endeavors at us, see what sticks), and not a knock against fearlessly trying things or whatever. The best brands are coy and careful with their identity... google sorta slops it around. this is a list of failed consumer facing products more than it is a list of "bad ideas".

By comparison, food processing companies introduce 9 new food products every day [1]. 70% fail within a year. [2]

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/processin...

[2] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/failure-rate-new-items-launch...

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#144

Post by maaku »

cbr wrote: post #112
nadams wrote: post #55

They forgot Google Code[1]. It's still "up" but it's obvious it's been abandoned by the amount of spam issues that have been building up. I know people like github more than google code - but I personally liked Google Code for it's simplicity. [1] - https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...

Should Google just kill it and suggest people move to GitHub?

Most google code projects don't use git.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#146

Post by tdkl »

21echoes wrote: post #82
holdenc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Google Checkout became Google Wallet, which shut down their API for digital goods three days ago: https://developers.google.com/wallet/digital/

their API for digital goods is now called Android Pay, and goes live within months ( http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/02/android-pay-is-real-and-wil... & http://www.androidcentral.com/google-launching-their-own-pay... )

.. and what will it be called after that ?

Google seems to hit their head through the wall that the issue in user adoption are the APIs. Nope, it's politics.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#147

Post by thrillgore »

s_dev wrote: post #5

Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do. Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

Wave tried to be a lot of things -- a social network, a collaborative editor, and a chat client at once. It did none of these things easily as a result of the mishmashed use cases. It's good technology searching for a problem that doesn't exist.

Wave has been collecting dust as an Apache project ever since.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#148

Post by acdha »

SuperKlaus wrote: post #87

Can't believe nobody mentioned Google Reader yet - that was such a great product and they killed it, still haven't found anything that comes close (and I'm paying for a theoldreader.com subscription, they're good but no Google Reader).

I find Newsblur.com has passed Reader in almost every way – feed management, social, etc. – and it has a viable business model, not to mention being open-source (https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur).

The one advantage Reader arguably still had was what came from their search infrastructure (caching nearly everything forever & near-realtime updates) but that's not something I notice very often.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#150

Post by JoeAltmaier »

livingparadox wrote: post #118
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm yet its leaky, buggy and low-feature. Useful for casual use but nowhere near professional. When will they drop it, or break it? Like some gmail features got broken this week. Lesson: don't hang anything important on Google apps.

Google docs is fantastic. I use it exclusively (docs and sheets) and haven't seen anything buggy about it. I have never found myself a wanting a feature in google docs that wasn't also missing from Office. The only limitation I came across in sheets was the limited scope of conditional formatting. That's pretty much it.

Ive just been using it a week or so, but this is what I remember right off.

Features missing from Word Docs: KeepTogether, orphan/widow management, page layout, reviewing(?)

Bugs:

typeface changes when going back to Normal after any heading (doesn't change but ribbon says it has).

Ctrl-C copies but Ctrl-X doesn't delete text

Font changes randomly DO or DONT apply to the line you're on, when not selected

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