Thinkfuse’s Status Report App Inspired by Google Internal Feature

I don't know if or why Google discontinued Snippets. Generally, we don't spend any time thinking about Google Snippets really. It just so happens that the writers really like to tie a story to Google :-)

Even when I was at Google a few years ago, it was clear that Snippets weren't the right fit for all teams. Smaller teams sitting around a single pod of desks probably don't need a tool for written status reporting. Larger teams create too many individual reports, so that's no good either. If I had to guess, the extremely simple Snippets tool simply didn't scale.

That said, the key insight we gained from Snippets was when we viewed it through the lens of "Social Enterprise Software". We were looking at products like Yammer, Chatter, Jive, etc. And said "Do businesses want social for social's sake?"

Ultimately, we've come to think of our business as "What would Microsoft Exchange look like in a post-Facebook world? How would it work if public folders were the default and private inboxes were secondary?"

It just so happens that weekly status reports presented a wonderful opportunity: reoccurring, broadcast messages, and required by a manager. It just oozes with potential for bottoms up viral distribution.

There's a lot of depth to this idea of reoccurring, semi-structured, broadcast business communication. Status reports, meeting minutes, stakeholder updates, trip reports, and so on. While there are armies of tools for making gantt charts and tracking work items, there are precious few for facilitating the flow of information. Coupled with the simple fact that businesses have a heartbeat measured by communication on some cadence, and you wind up where Thinkfuse is going :-)

I mean, there was a web site where everything wound up, and you could go and enter stuff that way, but why? I'd only go in there when backfilling a week I missed due to vacation or whatever, or to edit a mistake -- both rather rare occurrences.

I'd wager that snippets went away as an extension of the project database going away. They killed it last summer - after I left, to be clear. I heard about this from various sources.

Killing that is just another sign that the old Google is dead.