Curated playlists are more common now, but back then, it was a breath of fresh human air in a landscape of mediocre algorithms. Songza offered human-curated playlists to match a mood or an activity. Songza, meebo, & knol – Songza was a great music streaming service and meebo was a broadly networked messaging and social media tool which I used heavily for a while. However, the hope of Project Ara still remains in companies like Fairphone and Framework working to make products that are built to last. But alas, beautiful dreams are forever thwarted by the power of the bottom-line. Project Ara: A wonderful concept into the world of sustainable, modular, device manufacturing that sparked countless other companies to imagine a future where customers have more power and control and the world has less e-waste. As new technologies emerged and contact sharing became widely known and adopted, Bump was put to rest after being acquired by Google for Google Photos and the Google Phone. The architectural equivalent of going around one’s posterior to reach one’s elbow. Bump’s architecture pre-dated Near Field tech availability on phones and as such, the solution required accelerometers, GIS data, and IP address data.
Open Bump, stand next to a friend, bump phones and confirm the added contact. Thanks to Bump, sharing contacts became much simpler. But back in the early days of smartphones, navigating the process for a n00b was far less accessible and more byzantine. Google Reader, you are missed! – Justinīump! - Sharing contacts nowadays seems simple and easy. Now we have to deal with walled gardens of content like Medium. Many folks tried to replace you, but the blow was too big. For some odd reason your sibling Feedburner was kept around, which was only put out to pasture this year. Your closure pretty much single-handedly killed RSS for text based content - which I have to assume was by design. You made it so easy to knit together a blossoming blog ecosystem, and to keep up with a variety of tech blogs in the days before we had everything spoon-fed to us by sites like Hacker News. Google Reader – Oh Google Reader, how I loved thee.
While there are entire websites ghoulishly dedicated to dead Google products, we picked a few of our favorites over the years. So with that spirit, we wanted to pay tribute to some of the landmark Google products that didn’t get to celebrate along with the gang in Mountain View. It is hard to express how foundational, how groundbreaking, and how important to modern computing the contributions that this humble little search engine company has created in the span of two decades. While it is easy to look sidelong at what it has become over the last two decades, you can’t argue the impact.
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