Ask HN: Favorite product that got shut down? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite product that got shut down?

43 pointsrajarshc72 comments

Trying to launch a search fund to acquire VC backed businesses that couldn't scale. Would love your recommendations and get on a mission to revive a favorite product of this community.

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Google Reader. I believe this decision lead to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and consequently the fall of western civilization.

This. I moved to Feedly who have even started to implement parsers for non-RSS sites. I'm very happy with it.

I can also vouch for Feedly. I closed my Google account years ago and needed something to track my YouTube subscriptions. I use it for blog RSS feeds too. It's one of the few things I use that works so well that I don't really think about it.

Nothing I found is as simple and pleasant to use as Google Reader. Feedly comes close, but its default is an ML-curated "magazine" view, and the last thing I want to see is more infinite engagement-optimized streams of titles.

What is it that Google Reader had that the many RSS readers lack? Maybe I could incorporate it into my reader (https://sumi.news).

Network effects. Google Reader was big enough that many websites added RSS support to ensure users would return.

When Google Reader died, too many people stopped subscribing to feeds and hence websites stopped offering them.

I'm afraid it's not a simple feature you can just add to your reader :(

One of the more under-rated features, was that it could turn any site into an RSS feed. So if you had a niche site you enjoyed, but didn't have an rss feed, you could still plug it into Reader and get any new articles as if it had a built in rss feed

bingo

For me it was del.icio.us which used to be free but became supplanted by a paid service once acquired by Pinboard.

I know there's the "synced bookmarks" feature of various browsers but:

a) I don't want to be trapped to one browser because the same browser isn't necessarily the best experience on different devices

b) del.icio.us had superior capabilities for tagging and finding links

And whose inventor is still an active HN'er.

I miss del.icio.us

What were the extra capabilities that delicious had over pinboard?

StumbleUpon. Every click brought you to a different website, depending on your preferences and voting.

The Infinite Scroll Algorithm used in today's TikTok/Facebook/Reddit is similar, but too sterile because it's all hosted in the same place and hence subject to roughly the same community constraints.

StumbleUpon separated the recommendation engine from the hosting, which I find a lot more valuable. Unfortunately I think there are not enough interesting and independent websites around anymore for that.

Dunno, I'm not convinced there are fewer interesting websites today, seems they're a lot harder to find though.

https://stumblingon.com/

although not quite the same concept as stumbleupon's, http://boredhoard.com/ collects cool (mostly) independent websites not known by the general public; there are over 500 sites listed so far, packaged in weekly box releases

Picasa - The offline photo management program. The last version might still be around for download, but once you have multiple faces tagged in a photo, it randomly swap them... a nasty bug, which now can't ever be fixed.

I really liked Google Inbox. I went from Gmail to Inbox and then Google pushed me back to Gmail...

Many have said this before, but it would be really cool if there was a law or something that would encourage our motivate companies that go bankrupt or get shutdown to open source their code or product.

In my brief time there, I'm proud to say I was a member of the Inbox Resistance. Loved that app and tried to so hard not to refresh any browser once they turned it off internally. Goddam that one hurt.

Google Talk! It was XMPP but no one knew or cared and it was fast and simple and built into Gmail so all your cool artist friends could talk together and all the chats were saved to your Gmail inbox so you could reminisce even years later on the abundance of young wide-eyed youth.

Keybase. Should be a non profit like signal. Dump the messaging and file storage, just do cryptographic identity attestation, proofing, verification.

Well, it's not totally shut down. But it definitely didn't reach its potential. It would have been nice if it could have been the foundation for (at least more easily) developing your own things like messaging and file storage. Like if it served as the identity-basis and for confirming keys that protocols like Signal use, or as a secure layer over a Dropbox-alike, particularly on mobile.

I don't think there was ever an API for mobile devices to use with the app, so while you could build those things on a desktop you couldn't on mobile devices. And their file storage only went halfway on mobile (iOS at least). You could view files, but not open them in other applications. I used it for storing org-mode files (and other things) that had some private content and accessing it on other devices. Great if it's two PCs, I can visit the files in emacs. Useless for mobile.

I know it's a meme, but I genuinely miss Google Reader. It was so nice to have many sources of information aggregated into one app. Now it's fragmented across HN, Reddit, Substack, Twitter etc etc. I don't even bother following it all anymore.

Why don’t you use an RSS reader now? As a maker of a news reader (https://sumi.news), I’m curious what was it that made Google Reader special.

It’s not that google reader was special it’s just that with its death, rss essentially went on life support with fewer and fewer sites having first class support.

At least that’s understanding, as my usage of the internet was limited to flash games at the time.

I don't get that meme. Yes, Google Reader shutting down was a bit annoying, but I exported my subscriptions into a different reader and have been using that ever since. But somehow for soo many people it was really important, but they didn't bother replacing it?!

Inbox by Gmail. Bundles were great. The ability to view just the pinned emails was very useful for prioritization. And you could enter your own reminders instead of sending an email to yourself. Some of the other features (like email snoozing) made it into the main Gmail product.

Also, I miss Windows Phone. I was really hoping that one of the alternative OSes that were floating around 2014 or so would make significant inroads into the US phone market. Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish, Firefox OS, Tizen, Plasma Mobile. I got to try several of these! That was an interesting time.

Here is a nice list from Google https://killedbygoogle.com/

Cool Edit Pro. Bought by adobe, neutered, and released as Adobe audition. Audacity doesn't come close. I think most people moved to flstudio. I just stopped writing music once my last copy started acting up. I have it on a VM for doing batch processing, but I can't use it in real time anymore.

I also miss the macOS 8/9 version of graphic converter. It had a "send to folder" feature that made sorting huge directories of pictures very easy, and usable in group settings, like on a projector with a group of a half dozen or more.

There's more, but not having access to those two sticks in my craw.

What made it particularly cool for you? Curious why Audition doesn't fit the bill.

Everything Adobe touches these days turns to a SaaS, doesn’t it?

BlackBerry qwerty phones and the solid qnx based OS (bb10)

Parse

(bought by Facebook, shutdown and later open-sourced after major community outcry)

Also “parse by buddy” was a host using the open source version with generous free tier. Then the company shut that down.

Rdio. Still miss it every day.

Easy. Google Reader.

Pebble.

Yes!

A smart watch with a e-ink display, and no touch screen that had a good companion app that lasted 7 days on a charge! I really miss that tech. I don't need a smartwatch that has gps, a speaker, and touchscreen. I just need more of what the pebble 2 was shipping.

There were pebbles with displays? Crazy. Finding a good dot matrix display takes me longer than a half hour - I don't need 5000, nor do I want to pay $40 each. E-ink needs to be cheaper, I think it's probably good enough for stuff like watches.

There are arduinos with breadboards that are between US dime and US quarter sized, if I wanted the exact feature set I'd probably start there. Seeed or sparkfun or adafruit sells the little demo boards. Solder on a tiny lithium battery and charging/buck circuit, and a 9dof spatial sensor, and a prototype is born.

If you could get a metal clamshell around it and a band, you could have a watch that's overall smaller than the apple watches of yore.

What a great device with so much potential. If they could have survived longer, they could have been the classic Casio watch of our generation.

Bingo. I was a backer for the canceled Time Steel 2 and would have happily paid $200 more if they said they needed to raise the price. I still wear my Time Steel and am not sure what I’ll do when it expires.

Weather Spark used to be my favorite weather website. It had an interactive plot displaying a bunch weather data, historical, forecasted, historical min/max, and historical standard deviations. This was all in a side-by-side pane with a map view that showed radar data and temperature measurements at individual stations, and you could click different stations to see all of their historical data. It was the best interface to view forecasts and get a sense for how the recent weather stacks up against past years, IMO.

I have not seen any other weather site that comes close to it. The WeatherSpark team made a post to explain why they had to drop the old interface, but I forget the reasons now. The new interface is nothing like the old one -- static plots with buttons to switch to past dates / years, similar to Wunderground.

Fitbit Zip ... a tiny, belt-clip step counter that worked with Bluetooth and had a 30 day battery life. I don't want to wear a watch or ring or rely on my phone and I don't want to constantly charge another device, but I still want to count steps.

MiiVerse/WaraWara Plaza - Nintendo's awesome pseudo-social-network for the 3DS and Wii U; twitter was (and is) a vastly inferior non-replacement.

StreetPass - Nintendo's strange and clever system for sharing Mii characters, short greetings, and game data via ad hoc peer-to-peer wifi and asynchronous relay; reason enough to take your 3DS everywhere just in case you might get a streetpass! (Technically StreetPass still works but the Nintendo Zone relay stations have been shut down and the 3DS has been discontinued.)

PlayStation Home - Sony's largely pointless, generally unpopular - but free! - proto-metaverse for the PS3 that never made it out of beta but lumbered on, zombie-like, for several oddly fun years.

Firefox send!

For those looking for an alternative, wormhole.app seems nice

I used Google Allo frequently to communicate with peers privately. Then it became just another messaging app that Google axed.

What.cd music discovery died for new after that. I can’t find New music anymore and never seen to branch out into new sounds

Clones are still out there ;) There’s one whose name gets shortened to a color that has been treating me well.

Grooveshark.

Totally agree. It was the best.

Honestly Spotify is basically groveshark but with a fee

Probably hangouts.

Despite it's rather ugly/unmodernized interface, it had a lot going for it. Chat with people or text them, all from the same little box. Call anyone, by number or by email. Video conferencing/screensharing worked solidly.

WiMax WISPs. They were a potentially interesting competitor to cellular (and potentially cable ISPs) that focused on delivering simple wireless WAN internet connectivity rather than full-fat phone company service.

https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail

Helped me improve my understanding of last codebase and their design

have you found an alternative?

WebOS phones/tablets

I said Google Talk in another comment but webOS was really my favorite thing. Way ahead of its time. Everything written in the language of the web. Its multitasking and gesture card metaphor and execution is unrivaled even today. A largely unmolested Linux kernel under the hood.

UNIX workstations: Sun Ultra, HP-PA workstations.

modulus.io

Back in 2015, I was on the bus crossing Bay Bridge and one my team mates said out site is down. AWS had major issues with infrastructure. I logged in to Modulus on my phone and took down all containers in AWS and brought them up on GCP. Our web app was back and running within a minute. It was intuitive, cheap, and cross cloud providers out of the box. I still can’t find anything close to that.

YOu can find many examples for that in the 3D tooling world (not sure about VC details though). Caligari trueSpace, for example.

Mozilla Persona

Agree. Shame it wasn't adopted by more websites. It shutdown just before we launched a new SaaS that used it for auth.

screenhero.

best pairing app ever made. Slack bought them, shut it down and failed to deliver anything close to what it did

Yahoo Pipes

What was your use case for Pipes? I always thought it was neat but never used it.

I used it to parse different RSS/XML feeds and for some web scraping. I think of it as the grand daddy of all of these "no code" tools that we see these days and it was very intuitive to use.

I used Google Squared constantly for about six months before its death.

Uh, I just learned it ever existed. I was still studying hardcore back then and I guess I missed the cool new products for a while

Thanks for bringing it up. I'd like to have played with it

timeful! God the app had such a good interface for managing your day. Why did Google have to buy and shut it down!!!!

Europa Universalis: Magna Mundi

Firefox send.

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