Killed by Google.

[GlitchyZorua]

There are so many products by google that google kills off. Like Google+, or Google Hangouts, or iGoogle, or hell even Google Videos, back when youtube was a thing. In fact, before when Google+ was even a thing, there was Orkut!

This video (that I made), shown above, perfectly shows how dead google products make me feel. It's a burning memory. You probably used it once and never used it again, or maybe you saw a link to it on Googles Website, but never clicked on it, or maybe you heard someone talking about it at school, or work, or whatever crowded area, but never thought too much about it.

A list of dead google products can be found @ https://killedbygoogle.com/

Tell me, what are your stories behind these dead google products, which one do you miss a lot? (Or dont miss)

[Dan Q]

I mean, obviously Google Reader.

I stopped using it long before it got killed (I switched to TinyTinyRSS, and then to FreshRSS), so I wasn't directly impacted. But many people I know... just stopped using RSS the day Google Reader got switched off. And that's incredibly sad. 😭

But really, what's worst are the products they partially kill. The silent casualties. YouTube has lots of these. For example:

YouTube Annotations let creators put overlays, optionally containing text, onto their videos. They could be transparent and links, too, which meant some creators did things like "choose your own adventure" games where you jump between videos by clicking on particular parts of them. I had a video that I painstakingly made a "directors cut" of by adding literally thousands of annotations: you could switch to annotations mode and it was a whole different experience. And then one day... the feature got axed. All existing annotations got deleted, forever.

Or Video replies, where you could make a video get linked "as a reply" to another video. That was another YouTube feature that just... vanished. And in going, it "disconnected" tens of thousands of early YouTube videos: personal content that now lacks context, if you can find it at all. Sad times.

Or how Google Talk/Meet used to be XMPP based, and therefore interoperable, and that was awesome... until it wasn't.

Oh, and Google Wave was everything that Google Docs could have been if it was just a bit braver and more-playful. Fair play, they open-sourced it and the Apache Foundation picked it up, but it rotted all the same.

Or the Google Mini. I had one of those. I still have the t-shirt Google gave me, with it (I wear it when I dye my hair, so it's in poor condition, but it's still identifiable!). It was a teeny-tiny Google Search appliance (which they also killed, later) that you installed on your own network.

Oh, and Google Cardboard (and Daydream). That would have been so easy for them to open-source. Or at least, they could have let the existing app keep working. But no, they killed the app and patched the functionality it depended upon out of Android so it can never come back. I've got a Daydream and Cardboard headset here that are functionally useless now. Thanks, Google.

So yeah, I mostly just steer clear of their products nowadays. Can't bear to have my heart broken again, I guess!

[Melooon]

I tried daily driving BumpTop back in the day - it was not very good and I'm not surprised they killed it, but it was also super cool and I'm really sad they killed it 

• Google Wave was always mysterious, my friend got a beta invite and invited me too! Neither of us ever actualy figured out what it did but it felt very futuristic because it was called Wave!
• Tilt Brush was super cool and I'm surprised they let that one go; I know VR has had a slow time taking hold, but it will slowly creep in and having the primary art tool in it would be a very good move for them!
• I always liked Loon, partly because it was called Loon, but mostly become it involved big balloons 
• I had a Google Nexus phone and tablet, they were both ok, but nothing special.
• Google Pack was definitely something I installed on one of my first computers and I genuinely have no idea what it did but it was at the time when everything Google was still cool!
• Google+ was the start of Google becoming uncool, I think it had some interesting ideas involving circles and groups but I don't know anyone who really understood how they worked!
• Finally I was always intrigued by the Nexus Q, I'm not sure it actually did anything, but it was an orb and it had lots of ports on the back and was very expensive and frankly that's 90% of what I want out of my electronics 

[GlitchyZorua]

Google wave is open source! You can get the source code here: https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave

As for iGoogle, the hamster toy widget can be found here: https://www.abowman.com/gadgets/hamster/

You can even embed it to your site if you want.