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And the list of Google products that haven't been killed off numbers in the hundreds. Seriously, what large software development company hasn't ended development on some of its products? People dragging out Google Reader every time Google launches something new is getting old.

hangouts

Google Analytics - that thing that everybody "is used by", on every website, and without even knowing [0] or explicit consent.

[0] techies exempt.

To add to that: they bought that.

It used to be called Urchin I think.

Yep, that’s where the ‘UTM’ in all the query strings comes from, Urchin Traffic Monitor I think it was. I used to have the standalone version installed which worked locally on servers and was completely independent of Google, but looked identical to Google Analytics at that time. Of course, Google realized they couldn’t mine any of the tracking data from the standalone version, so that was axed around like 2008 or 2009.

Urchin's original mode of operation was as a cron job that scanned your correctly-formatted Apache access_log (via LogFormat stanza) and dumped them into a DB. So there's issues of scale that had to be dealt with, and they decided to just dump it and go w/ the tracking JS.

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