Show HN: Product Graveyard – Commemorating the most memorable dead products | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Product Graveyard – Commemorating the most memorable dead products

productgraveyard.com

265 pointsndduong126 comments

Hi, I'm the creator of Product Graveyard, a fun way to keep track of and commemorate our favorite products that are with us no more.

I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. For building the site, I used a bootstrap grid for front-end structure and node.js to help with filtering and inserting the data.

Please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products.

Excellent site, love it.

I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...

Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.

But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes. 1) rebranding 2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more

It's a zombie horror story!

That does sound like a horror story... I guess zombies still belong in the graveyard.

I actually like Lync. Why don't you?

I'm not the GP, but I have a client who uses Lync. We usually have conference calls with three or four people, and someone always has an audio problem.

The screen sharing also seems to take a while to sync up. Worse, it silently stops updating somewhere in the call. Lync seems to have the worst real world performance of any screen sharing / conferencing app I've used.

have you checked firewall issues? MS has a list of ips, urls and protocols that need to be open in order to use it.

Me too. It is a key tool for me as a PM. I have run meeting with hundreds on call.

I hate it, for several reasons (some of it could be user error or local configuration, but still):

- For a long time, the status of other users it showed was completely off. Like showing people online when they weren't. Also, sending messages sometimes mysteriously failed.

- Cannot copy conversation as text (formatting is messed up). Cannot save it as text without removing smileys.

- Cannot paste text verbatim into conversation without making silly smileys everywhere.

- There is a (relatively small) limit on how much text you could paste in.

- Couldn't transfer certain files (like .js or .exe).

Many of these things make sense for things like unmoderated chat, but I need to work, and sometimes exchange larger amounts of text and binary data.

I'd add: completely unreliable conversation history. I never figured out why it saved some messages but not others.

Basically why I loved it when we started using Slack.

You are so right haha. I guess working at a bigco has trained me on it and also because of the (relatively) "pretty" UI. Ive used Slack for side projects and its definitely a lot smoother/modern.

It is annoyingly in your face, ugly, slow and unreliable. It offers nothing that isn't done better by another program.

The only reason it can compete is because of Microsofts package deals and the anticompetitive integration with the rest of their ecosystem.

The executable is still named lync.exe.

I currently use Lync for Mac, but we're "transitioning" to Skype for Business. I'm saddened to learn that it doesn't make a difference.

Unlike the Windows client (of course!) the Mac S4B client is in fact a complete re-write compared to Lync for Mac. It is still horrible, in different ways (of course!) than the Windows client, but generally is a modest improvement on Lync for Mac.

Windows Lync>Skype for Business is literally a registry key you roll out that changes the name and some minor interface chrome.

Our office still uses Lync as the backend for VOIP. It is the bane of my existence, somehow they managed to work every single Microsoft anti-pattern into this product.

Yes. And the UI sucks as bad as the older one. I can't believe such a poor product with constant UI freezes is still in production. Time gap from launching to the point of usability on this atrocious piece of shit is an incredible 1 min on my modern PC. This is one product I hope everyday to see on this product graveyard.

As a bit of a hijack, copy and paste is fucked.

But paste without formatting works, which is something like Shift+Ctrl+V.

Stupid, but just about usable if desperate.

I love the design of Product Graveyard! Personally, I would’ve gone with darker colors, seeing as it fits the whole “graveyard” theme.

One nitpick: isn’t it inefficient to generate a unique banner image for every dead product? Each one is largely the same, except for the product logo being in the center. Would help to remove these banners or compress them so pages load faster on mobile.

Thanks for the feedback! In terms of the color scheme, I wanted to make Product Graveyard an inspiring place where we can honor great products and be thankful that they were once in our lives. Hence, the brighter colors and the more cheerful tone to it.

As for the banner, I will definitely make this improvement in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

Any plans for adding categories/tags and/or search functionality?

Putting alternatives there is quite good.

Those banner images are also way too big - they're 4800px x 3200px and 1.2mb, and take ages to load even on wired connections.

That's cool. Definitely bringing some memories back. If scroll position is maintained when going back to the homepage I'd definitely stayed longer :).

This looks pretty good, I will check further later.

Your UI & UX is amazing! I also love the following below each gravestone.

> Did you know _____ ? Please share a eulogy or funny story.

lol.

delicious.com is dead but del.icio.us is alive - in read only format. Archived as it was in the beginning. Just logged in and could see my bookmarks. At least that seems to be the plan of idlewords.

Apps are not listed? Like Sparrow is missing - the email client killed by Google.

del.icio.us was the original URL of the site, delicious.com was never anything but an alternate URL. And I wouldn't call a bookmark service that you can't save bookmarks to, "alive."

Really interesting site to browse, thanks! I would love to see a screenshot or two added for each product, ideally captured back in its heyday/prime.

Now you made me remember how much I miss GrooveShark...

Also, the list makes me realize a problem with putting everything "in the cloud": with a traditional desktop application, if the vendor goes belly up or just doesn't feel like working on it any more, at least you can keep using the version you already have. If the whole thing runs on the web, and the vendor decides to pull the on those servers, it's just gone.

Been saying this for years. Gaming has some egregious examples like Diablo 3 where the single player mode turned into "multiplayer server with nobody else in it" and if your internet connection goes down or battle.net has problems you can't play the game at all.

Blizzard has a good track record of supporting old games, and as a studio I think they'll be around for a long time, but they won't be forever.

I recently read that Shadow of War is similarly always-online single player. And I have much less faith in Warner Brothers Games to keep that running than I do in Blizzard.

How did you collect all the data?? Manually, or did users upload it themselves??

Looks great by the way!! Really interesting to peruse.

The first set of data was sourced from https://siftery.com/, but I do plan on using user-uploaded data to help with data curation in the future.

I feel winamp should be here

Lync is installed on my work laptop. Not quite graveyard yet...

Some to add :

Napster

Alta Vista

WinMX

I'm still sore about Google Reader. I haven't found another reader that has quite found the right UX to replace it.

https://bazqux.com/ was the closest i found in terms of UI and performance with the amount of feeds/items i go through (~1000 items/day) - Been pretty happy with it since Google Reader shutdown

How on earth do you manage to keep up with 1000 items / day? I barely manage 1/10th of that and I'm a pretty fast reader.

Please enlighten me, it sounds like you hold a secret that would substantially improve my life.

Reading 1000 things a day would probably make me suicidal

I don't read 1000/day, but I do step through 1,000 - I scan a headline/summary, hit "j" and move on for the vast majority of them. Some i'll star and come back to later, for others the first sentence of the summary is really enough to learn something about what's going on.. eg "vulnerability found in XYZ" is useful to tuck away in the back of my mind, but that's all i need.

Others are the same story reported by multiple sources; obvious from the headline.

I leave it open in a pinned tab and when i want to kill a minute or two, i'll scan through a few more posts and open a few to actually read.

The reason i like Bazqux is that it can keep up no matter how fast i hit "j". It's no prettier than Google Reader does, has few more bells/whistles, but if you really want to speed through items, save and search, it's great.

In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.

Thank you!

> In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.

About a decade ago - when the state of the art really wasn't up to it yet - I invested some money in a start-up that was attempting to achieve just that. They eventually turned to greener pastures and are still alive but I am still hopeful that someone will manage to put this together. I'd be more than happy to pay for such a thing.

Which reminds me of another dead product I used to use to do exactly this: Yahoo Pipes.

NewsBlur (https://newsblur.com/) is not quite the same, but it fits the bill for me.

Same here, but I've used Digg Reader (yes) for a long time after trying a few and it's been great. Depends on how you like it of course.

Are you an Emacs user? My journey was Google Reader -> Newsblur -> elfeed (on Emacs). I only abandoned Newsblur because of an ongoing project to Emacsify my digital life.

Now I will have to look for the Vim alternative.

Have you heard of Evil?

https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

IMO - and I speak as someone who loves Emacs so much he has email, organisation, TODOs, calendaring, IRC, RSS and more in Emacs - vi actually does a better job of the mechanics of text editing.

Evil gives you the best of both worlds - the Emacs platform, and vi editing.

InoReader https://www.inoreader.com/ is the closest I've found to Google Reader. Happily using it for several years already.

I use https://theoldreader.com, it seems to work quite well, and I've been using it since Google Reader shut down.

I'm a big fan of The Old Reader. The UI is quite similar to Google Reader (as I remember it), and because it's only focussed on feeds it's not cluttered with other functionality. There's even a working Windows Phone app (TORUC) for those of us still avoiding Apple or Google.

I've taken out a subscription in the hope that it will last longer than Google Reader or Bloglines (anybody remember that?).

YES! Been using Bloglines as long as possible. It took Google Reader quite a while to outperform Bloglines back then.

Last I checked alternatives, I liked g2reader.com slightly better than theoldreader.com, though I use it just very occasionally.

Yeah, why don't they just open source it, and hand it to the community?

What I find really interesting about lists like this one is that many of the entries are really great ideas that only failed due to poor timing or bad luck or a single error. The fact that someone failed to build something huge the first time around is not evidence that copying one of the entries wouldn't work now. It's just really hard to know which idea might work if it launched today instead of two years ago.

Funny story, Lync[1] still exists. Actually it was an update to Skype for Business, at least on our systems at work.

I'm using it right this minute: http://imgur.com/a/qQ648

http://productgraveyard.com/products/lync.html

Officially, Lync became Skype for Business. In reality, Skype for Business is the hellspawn of Skype and Lync.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

In reality, your IT admins have control of a GPO/registry key that will declare whether your client should be called "Lync" or "Skype for Business" when you launch it. In typical Microsoft wisdom, I guess they provided this to prevent too much culture shock in the transition. You're using the Skype for Business client with the "Lync" skin.

It's sobering to look at all these products and think about how developers poured thousands of hours into something that no longer exists.

Makes you reflect on the ephemerality of life - entire civilizations that existed for thousands of years have come and gone. A computer program that's been around for 10 years has had a good run.

If they got a good exit payout, it's probably a lot easier to cope with.

This is actually one of the reasons I do a lot of non-tech hobbies like woodworking and making wine. So much of what I do is ephemeral. It exists as bits stored in a computer, it not something I can physically touch. Literally everything I've ever written at work could, and probably will, cease to exist one day.

But the wine rack I made and the bottles in it aren't going anywhere. Well, okay the bottles will, but there will be more. :)

actually when it comes down to it, everything you do is ephemeral.

That usually comes down to something like everything is X or everything is not X, in some way or other. Isn't that so?

I have never tried it but I increasingly find myself pulled by carpentry. I have no solid reasoning for this. It's just a connotation if I may say so. So feel of the wooden furniture. My thoughts about preserving them and how I like antique or older (and actually simpler but functional) study desks. How, whenever I think of buying one, I never find the exact study desk I want and it seems like a good idea to make my own. I think I should just get a kit and start with something simpler like a sitting stool, or a pen holder.

Do it! :) I do green wood carving myself, which is very satisfying, but when I have the space I'm definitely going to start making my own furniture. A desk is high up the list, as I don't think I've found a single one that works for me.

Funny, I've gone down the same path. I enjoy woodworking quite a bit. One of the strangest things in a craft like woodworking (compared to software) is that once it's finished, it's finished. I built a table for our startup office, and it's the one thing I've built at work that I never have to update or fix.

I've also mixed that in with some 3D printing and CNC builds that sort of blend the two worlds together.

Missing one of my all-time favorite dead products: Google Wave

Uh I liked Orkut a lot. It was my first social network and pretty much the last in many ways.

That was adopted by the Apache Foundation and is still under active development. It was opened up and turned in to "Wave In A Box" that you can run on your own server. https://incubator.apache.org/wave/

I just added Google Wave as a featured product! Thanks for the feedback. Although it is technically open-source and operated by another company. We can still say Google Wave is dead but just under a different skin. I guess it's another zombie

If you had a newsletter like "new dead website of the month" if something died, I'd sign up.

I also would appreciate a gallery of screenshot for each product to get a feel for what it was.

No need to constantly email anyone for dead products but the gallery is a very good idea.

Well it would be like once per month, 6 months or even once a year. The issue with not doing it is that I will never ever open the site again. But if I got an email in a year I'd definitely do it to see what died, if anything.

I feel the worst for Meerkat. They basically had a few weeks between blowing up huge at SXSW and then getting effectively shut down by Twitter with the launch of Periscope.

No justice in this world.

I see it as fair karma. They relied on a Big Bang "lucky event" in SXSW and just as quickly got shut down. Perfect justice.

What? Bad karma for doing PR at a big technology event? Let me guess, you fall into the "anyone doing marketing is bad" camp.

no. what i meant is that they relied on 1 lucky event to get big. and it took just 1 unlucky event to bring them down. so it evens out.

You had to create an account and I refused. One user lost. Periscope had Twitter accounts at least. I hate creating accounts before seeing the product.

I really like the tone and the realization.

Just a small thing that bother me is that on my desktop machine, the second column is not aligned as neatly as the others (due to two lines descriptions maybe ?)

Hmm, that's strange. I'm not seeing it on my desktop. Do you mind posting a screenshot of it?

For me they all get more and more misaligned: https://imgur.com/gallery/QUDuE

FF 55.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04.3 with uBlock and Privacy Badger

For me, the Vine tile doesn't have an app icon (looks like uBlock is suppressing it), and everything below shifts up:

https://kek.gg/i/3kytsn.png

(probably an argument for min-height)

Thanks for the screenshot! I cannot reproduce this on my end but will watch out for it.

Seems to be blocked by uBO filter:

##img[alt="Vine"]

Arguably an issue with the filterlist being too broad. Changing the alt-text would probably work as a workaround for now.

Thanks! It should be fixed now.

From the feedback here in HN it seems clear that you need a "suggest product" button. Maybe it could even be a Disqus on the bottom on the home page, which would automatically give you up/down votes functionality (;

We actually do have a suggest product button on Product Graveyard! If you click into any of the products and click the "Submit Autopsy Report" button in the nav bar, it should take you to a form where you can suggest which product we should feature next. Here is the direct link to it: https://siftery-track.typeform.com/to/n5IT7u

In that case, I believe the suggestion changes to... make it more discoverable.

Overall though, I think the site is great!

Man, I totally didn't realize that Vine died. It feels like just yesterday I was... watching Vines on YouTube. hmm

Thanks for the feedback! I just made the button more visible by placing it on the nav bar of the home page.

If you are going that far back how about including the original LapLink (and intersvr in MSDOS6 that implemented similar features). Pushing files over null-modem or the parallel port equivalent for extra speed was a godsend back when proper networking was relatively rare at home (or in small offices) so floppy-net was the main alternative.

The company still exists (was "Travelling Software, now renamed to Laplink Software) but obviously that specific product is pretty meaningless in today's environment unless you are playing with museum-piece hardware for nostalgia/shits/giggles.

I love everything about this except the name. To laypeople, "product" != "software product", and it's revealing your bias. Why don't you just call it Software Graveyard?

I'm guessing it's a pun on ProductHunt.

That's a valid point. There's definitely a software bias now, but the name product is more extensible. I just added 4 more featured products today and will be adding more in the future!

Great job, this is a fun concept that is well executed.

I was going to add Geocities, but I was surprised to find out that it is still available in Japan. Anyone have insight as to why Yahoo kept it alive in that market?

Yahoo Japan is probably the only Yahoo anyone (willingly) uses. E.g. Yahoo! Auctions is the equivalent of eBay here.

Yahoo! Japan was a joint partnership of Yahoo! and SoftBank. From what I could tell while working at Yahoo!, Yahoo Japan was able to use whatever software they wanted from Y!, but whatever they developed wasn't accessibly by the rest of Y!

So, they had their own installation of geocities, and didn't need to take it down. Yahoo auctions is also big in Japan, but was killed everywhere else. (Edit: change was to is)

Yahoo Auctions in Japan is still the market leader today! :P

Sorry, I've edited, I left Y! a while ago, and didn't follow the japanese auction market, so I wasn't sure if it was still the leader.

I think Mercari has a legit chance of catching them, but YA is definitely the leader.

You know you've made it when you get a Truncation nickname in Japan (sort of like the Hollywood couples names like bennifer) "yafuoku"

Congrats on making such a neat site! It's quite interesting to see all the dead products and services that (often) never quite achieved their full potential.

That said, one thing does bother me here, and I'm not sure whether it's a mistake or not.

Basically, the all products lists don't seem to link to the individual pages for the closed products. In most cases that's likely fine (since I doubt you have separate pages for every single product listed), but it would be convenient to have them link to the product's page for more details when they're available.

http://productgraveyard.com/see-all-products-a.html

Other than that, it looks pretty good.

Upvoted on PH as well - You did a great job mate. Well done on the UI and the concept.

Huh, I knew I had a zombie bitcasa account that I assumed I'd been paying for but was too lazy to cancel, and was surprised to see it on your list! I think there's a market for a product that individually curates a person's miscellaneous accounts (say it watches your bank/credit card accounts or whatever) and alerts them when fees increase or the company goes bankrupt or it looks like a zombie account (and maybe offer to close it for $10 ($30 for comcast)).

Great site, brings back memories. A few little issues I found

1. On mobile I have to scroll past all the featured products to get to "all products". A link at the top or a hamburger menu would be great!

2. No search?

3. "all products" doesn't appear to include "featured products"? For instance Picasa and Google reader are in featured but not in all.

Other than that its a lovely design and a good concept. Well done.

Thanks for the feedback. There's now a navigation bar for easy access to "all products". All products should include featured products now, and I will be implementing search in the near future :)

I love google desktop search (RIP 2011.)

Last year I found a windows version of it online and found it still usable even in windows 10. Very unsafe I know - I did use ProcExploer+VirusTotal to check its binary signatures on 60+ scanner sites.

It still much better/faster than the native Win10 Cortana search.

Love know if there any open source clone of it?

Love the site! However, it looks like you have some apps listed on the main page, but not in the list of all apps. For example, I submitted Aperture because I couldn't find it in the "A" section of the list of all apps. But I see that it is actually there on the main page near the bottom.

Thanks for the feedback! I just fixed that issue. All featured products should show up in the list of all products now.

>Fireworks was not a unique child. It was not different from Photoshop or Illustrator so Adobe shut it down.

That's not true, it was notably different than the two, it was replaced by Adobe XD.

Code Warrior

Oh man - this is gone?

I mean, yeah, it's been like 20 years so I'm not surprised

But it's still sad

The name is still used on NXPs IDE for their chips, but it's a new Eclipse-based thing, not based on the old one.

Good point, it saved Apple at that time... still miss it. I also used it to learn coding for Windows from macOS. Their line for their cross compiling tools was funny "Being there without having your hands dirty" :-)

I still miss Lotus Improv (I think it not on the list).

Wow, I remember the times I used LimeWire. It was a nice service with the alternatives offered.

They should've added Orkut. Met my first girlfriend in that platform.

Thanks for the feedback! I just added Orkut :) http://productgraveyard.com/products/orkut.html

No submit button?

Ok here then:

Foldershare

Great peer to peer file sync tool.

Acquired by Microsoft and shut down. Slowly shaking head

"Submit autopsy report" is in the top navigation bar, although it links to an external form service: https://siftery-track.typeform.com/to/n5IT7u.

Microsoft Bob

Google wave!

Added!

Bit premature to list Flash..

Is it though? Giving it until 2020 might end up being generous http://productgraveyard.com/products/flash.html

Is it though? It's already officially announced by Adobe and most sites do not use Flash anymore.

Mtgox? Liberty Reserve?

BeOS

Related, Gobe Productive. Vaguely similar to Microsoft Works in that it incorporated basic word processing, spreadsheet and vector art functionality, but you could do all three as tabs within any single document.

Originally came out for BeOS, then there was a Windows version.

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