Google Fusion Tables Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Google Fusion Tables Shutting Down

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85 pointsceocoder45 comments

Google Fusion Tables and the Fusion Tables API will be turned down December 3, 2019

Anyone else put off by the ridiculous use of "turned down" here? "Turned off", maybe.

Yes, I think it's fascinating! It seems to be a new euphemism for "shutdown" that they've been using (perhaps first internally?) for the past year or two.

A few other examples:

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/announcing-turndown-...

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprec...

https://plus.google.com/+LesiaSliusarenkoCM/posts/AiyjSfWJjA...

It's an improvement from "sunsetting" which was in vogue for a while.

It might be surprising to outsiders and perhaps it shouldn't spill out, but it's pretty normal lingo inside Google engineering. You turn up things (services, clusters, products) and later turn them down.

Double speak at a company that does no evil. Color me surprised. I prefer the verb kill. Google gives life to certain services and then kills them.

You are ascribing motives that don't exist. It's not double speak, if you're referring to 1984: it's just that "turning down" is the converse of "turning up". That's a fairly simple and straightforward explanation, no matter how unfortunate it turns out to be. Most of the time, it's used when an internal service moves: it turns up in X and turns down in Y. I'm not sure what your motives are, but I know that you're off mark here.

IME, it was common lingo in the telecom world a couple decades ago too. Typically in reference to physical circuits.

To expand on this a bit, it's likely that the etymology here is from SRE-land where they're dealing with turning up the resources for a service, and turn up is very similar to "spinning up", although inclusive of non-HDD resources.

There is a difference to me in turning down a service (you could turn it up again) and shutting down a service (not going to ever come back up (in the same incarnation.)) Even shuttering a service works.

Raymond Chen's excellent blog The Old New Thing has spent much time cataloging the weird permutation of English that has grown up among people at Microsoft, which he calls "Microspeak": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/microspeak

I'm guessing "turned down" is an emergent example of a new dialect, "Googlespeak."

It’s nothing like hotel “turn down service” which is typically a good thing. Sometimes you even get a mint.

Maybe the “mint” with “turned down” saas apps would be the ability to export your data?

Very sad about this. I was searching for a good online, collaborative database, where I can define clear schemas and provide certain views on it, for a small, public database a few friends and me are working on. Fusion Tables seemed to fit the bill as Google Sheets was basically too unstructured for this (basically I tried to find a free, collaborative, simple MS Access)

Airtable is almost exactly that: a collaborative, simple MS access. It's free for up to 1,200 records, then $10/user/month for more https://airtable.com/pricing

Another vote for Airtable. It's truly a game changer.

Thanks! I've considered it before but not sure anymore why I did not choose it. Though it probably relates to the fact that we are a small volunteer project with insecure funding (i.e. currently none) that tries to keep a records database of contact information up-to-date. This goes hand-in-hand with complex permission management/input controls (i.e. those listed should be able to submit a request for modification or for adding their record) and the possibility for integrating the result in a website. I don't think such integration tools are included in the free version

Why don't you just ask them if you could use it for free? It's not much cost to them and they could do something good.

Try https://cloudbackend.appdrag.com It's a serverless db (and API builder), with structured types and full sql support, also provide a cool UI, Visual SQL, an API and can be shared to co-workers.

You get 500 records for free and 50k records for $10/month (unlimited users)

I've yet to find a silver bullet, though Airtable is pretty solid.

Other options - https://clickup.com/ https://www.obvibase.com/ https://www.caspio.com/ https://www.grubba.net/ https://sodadb.com/

Googling for airtable alternatives will pop up with dozens of others though who knows which will stay around. Airtable seems to have the mindshare to continue to be around.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I'll never forgive them for BufferBox.

Reader for me

Panoramio for me. Spent many hours uploading, locating and annotating photos from 30 years of photography. Many of which were of things that don't exist any more and of places most people didn't have access to. Never again Google.

That site lists smartphones like the Nexus One. Do they expect Google to support every smartphone forever?

Well. To be fair. It was killed.

All the more reason to use R, pandas, SQL and other open source, database projects.

I find it hard to see much overlap between this product and any of the things you listed - except in the broadest sense.

It's better to rely on code-based data tools, like those I mentioned, than "experimental" Google projects that'll get "turned down" at the drop of a hat.

It's a shame, but not a surprise. I used to teach Fusion Tables to journalists [0] as a gateway into the power of SQL/relationships. The merge functionality was an effective if watered-down version of a proper SQL join, but it got the point across in a way that VLOOKUP couldn't. But Fusion Tables's killer function was its integration with Google Maps. For novice users who couldn't build a simple HTML page to to save their lives, Fusion Tables was an incredible way to create a powerful interactive with data.

I stopped teaching FT because several years ago because it seemed clear, in an implicit way, that it wasn't getting the traction. I hardly ever heard anyone inside or outside of Google talk/tweet/etc about it, in the same way people do for Sheets or BigQuery. I missed the easy data-to-interactive-map workflow for teaching, but for production work, FT was just too clunky (and merge far too limited compared to a SQL join) to justify using as a data store.

[0] http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping...

I hope we don't hear news of Google sunsetting any more of their products in 2018(first Google Plus and now Fusion Tables).

Allo?

The end of Inbox was announced in 2018 too.

Hang outs

Another Google product bites the dust

This one hurts because I recommended to and helped a number of business users to use Fusion tables as an alternative to building out something in-house.

It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.

There is an entire section where they not only list and link to the alternatives but also describe how they can act as a replacement.

> It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.

It would be really weird for them to do that, but the sentence you quote is immediately followed by a bulleted, annotated list of alternatives (stripped of descriptions, those listed are: Google BigQuery, Google Cloud SQL, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, and an upcoming set of new map visualization tools that you can sign up for info about.)

I wonder which of these has a better projected lifespan?

Fusion tables was alive for 9 years, so ...

Some of those are living on borrowed time then.

Whelp, there goes my laboratory updates repository. We were using each Google Fusion Table cell as a pre-formatted text-box which we could then sort and search. Does anyone know of any alternatives for this purpose? I made [a post](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/49546/2134) describing the requirements for what is essentially a "sortable and searchable pre-formatted text post publisher" and I keep running into related use cases.

Aww man, time to migrate my side-project. I used fusion tables essentially as a DB + Frontend. I scraped a bunch of review data on colognes / perfumes and sorted them based on sillage (projection) / longevity: http://fragrances.ziggymo.com/

What percentage market share does a Google product need to dip below to be culled? I was wondering this today when the G+ shutdown was accelerated - it was at 0.14%. Could this be used as an early warning sign?

I worked at Google for almost 10 years. In my experience, these end-of-life projects often get shutdown because nobody wants to work on them.

There are a ton of interesting projects at Google for people to work on, so people select for interesting things with potential high-impact. If a team can't be formed to own the product, maybe someone will volunteer to take care of it in their 20% time. But there are these company-wide mandates to move production systems from a storage system to a newer one, and a part-timer doesn't see the point of doing such thankless job.

Management can also play a role. If a VP wanted to support the product, it would get supported. But they use the basic heuristic as above ("is this an interesting project with high potential impact"). In this analysis a VP is just a proxy for 100 engineers making the same decision.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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