Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

At the same time, Google seems to want it both ways. They have an idea and use their size to attract users and, perhaps even unintentionally, effectively block others from implementing the idea or scare others away (a size thing). Then, if they decide they don't like it, which can feel arbitrary, they pull out. Now the idea is tainted so others are less likely to implement it and users are left wondering what to do. They really seem like a bull in a china shop sometimes.

I like the innovation and the experimentation, but it seems like they could be more graceful about it for both users and other entities trying the same things. Perhaps they should try these experiments in a more stealth way? Pretend not to be Google? Of course, people might super-hate on them for that, huh?

That sucker was good. Great even.

It would find things across browsers, through documents and files and even collate results from web searches that most browsers - sometimes even Chrome to this day - missed or never registered in the history, in the first place.

I would have gladly paid some $50-$75 a year to have it work across all of my devices.

And I don't typically pay for most offerings. It was that good.

I miss that one badly.

Similarly, I'd put a phonograph in a museum, even though it's features have been replaced by other things.

You can't have it both ways, people.

Which is nice for Google, but screws over the users. If you're a user, you should be well aware that Google's products are unreliable and are there as an experiment.

Really? Can you explain more why. Is there an article accompanying it that shames Google or says anything bad about it. To me it just looks like a company that iterates and is trying new things.

> A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Well it would be bad if they completely threw away the code, and then hired a whole new group of people to work on a similar project. That would make them look worse.

* - now code.openhub.net

https://codesearch.debian.net/

It's part of their spreadhseet now. You type things out and drag the items, like you would numbers to count.

I too missed sets a lot and was very happy to have found that:)

Wave was a textbook example of how you can fail if people don't understand why they should use your product. They gave up on it (by handing it to the Apache Foundation where it continues to be developed), rolled the clever collaboration technology into Google Docs, and told everyone they'd made it so you could edit a doc at the same time as someone else. Everyone continues to love it to this day.

GA worked quite well at first. There were some very active users that did excellent work and got paid quite nicely for their efforts. But a vague set of rule changes started to migrate in.

For example, a non-verified observer could comment on a question and pretty much give the entire answer. An official GA Researcher would answer the the question above the line, and the response from Google would be "Well, you didn't add any information to this topic than what was already on the page, so no payment for you". Riiiiight.

There were other little quirks and then eventually Google announced one day it was over. That's just how it rolled with them. I'm chalking it up to shiny things elsewhere that took attention away from GA. I did get a nice fleecy blanket as a Christmas gift one year. Not sure why.

That's somewhat true for certain technical aspects but it's too quick to ignore the mistakes Google made and minimize the value of work which more successful products put into the user experience.

Google never made the case for why using Wave would benefit you; as with Buzz, Plus, etc. Googlers reported liking it because they had both critical mass and pressure to use it long enough to see the benefits but few people outside did.

Instead, what we did hear about a lot was the technology which was going to change the world right up until it failed. This is a common failure mode for Google where the strong engineering culture crowds out UX, forgetting that for almost any product that's an implementation detail which most people shouldn't need to care about.

Wave has been collecting dust as an Apache project ever since.

Frankly, it is nearly impossible to recommend Keep when Evernote exists. Until they have, at minimum, some way to organize notes, it's just a pile of notes sitting in one window. But it would still be a hard sell when compared to all the Evernote features, such as the desktop clients that allow you to take screenshots and annotate them.

Edit: Oh, and there's also Geeknote¹ for CLI usage, as well as Vim plugins².

¹ http://www.geeknote.me/ ² https://github.com/neilagabriel/vim-geeknote

I wish they'd start charging for it.

The one advantage Reader arguably still had was what came from their search infrastructure (caching nearly everything forever & near-realtime updates) but that's not something I notice very often.

Google has actually moved away from supporting podcasts without 3rd party software, whereas Apple introduced a dedicated app with iOS 6.

It is notable that Google doesn't internally use services. If for example they wrote everything to work on appengine/cloud in exactly the same way and APIs as outsiders do, then spinning out would be a lot easier. http://steverant.pen.io/

[1]: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/

So for all intents and purposes, the original project is dead.