You Known?

10 Failed Google Projects

 
The reach of Google,
 its omnipresence -- from software to hardware to personal search 
results to location metrics to blog publishing -- has become a fact of 
life as quickly as the Internet
 has grown and changed, finding its way into our daily lives at every 
turn. As tablets and smartphones bring internet connectivity into our 
everyday experiences, keeping us closer than ever to our information, 
Google has followed. Its Android OS, in less than a decade, has become 
industry standard for the new guard of the pervasive Web. As we know, 
this is due to both Google's in-house concentration on innovation and 
also canny, even prescient acquisition of smaller, promising startups.

Google
 is very good at sniffing out the future, and bringing it to us in the 
most useful possible way -- until its products are so seamlessly 
transitioned into the toolbox we might wonder what we ever did before 
them. But that "throw everything at the wall" approach, even integrated 
with Google's focus on user experience, can't win every time. The 
probability just doesn't hold up under that massive amount of 
experimentation and open-handed approach. This rolling journey of debuts
 and re-absorptions has become the new norm: Everything is in 
beta-testing, all the time. Lose a Google product you love, and chances 
are you'll see the features that struck your fancy show up in something 
else soon.

In this article, we'll look at a variety of these 
"failures," across this spectrum. Some projects are simply failed 
analogues to products we still use today; others turn up piecemeal in 
different forms. In fact, Google has shown us a great deal about the 
nature of online development, experimentation, and innovation itself -- 
and that mistakes, properly recuperated back into the experiment, aren't
 really mistakes at all.


 

  
   
This screenshot from the video that Google created to promote Lively promised a new level of social interaction with the Web.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


10: Google Lively
Google Lively is one of the most interesting examples of "right idea,
 wrong implementation" precisely because nobody has ever heard of it (it
 lasted for six months in 2008) [source: Schonfeld].
 And while "Second Life" and similar non-game virtual environments are 
currently languishing, the social-networking aspects of Lively come 
across, in retrospect, like a particularly loving exploration of what 
"online life" could mean.

Users created avatars to interact in a 
three-dimensional environment that combined recognizable chat dynamics 
with "Minecraft"-style architecture and creation of spaces. While the 
experience itself was reportedly frustrating due to server glitches and 
lags, the idea was fairly solid. Chat rooms
 have been around since the beginning of the Internet, as a way to 
communicate with real-life friends as well as meeting and connecting 
with strangers, and vogues in their use tend to shift pretty often: 
ChatRoulette was trendy for a second, for example, while recent advances
 in webcam and video-chat have only begun moving real time video 
interaction into the realm of the video-phones we were always promised.

Which
 could be the problem. Chat-rooms and bulletin boards, once the standard
 for online friendliness, have given way to the social Web. When we meet
 strangers now, it's often through established connections: Facebook,
 Twitter and similar online social giants all operate on the idea of 
shared experiences we've already had. While in the dawn of the Internet,
 real-life analogues to night clubs or coffee shops such as Lively, made
 sense, we've moved past the idea that the Internet is a "place" that 
you "visit," obviating the need for such measures. Now, the Internet 
lies atop the world we already live in, so mixing things up with people 
we don't know is no longer the goal: It's a feature. A consequence of 
living in the world, rather than part of our escape from it.


 

  
   
Even though the service is no longer taking new questions, you can still visit the Google Answers FAQ.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


9: Google Answers
Another thing we don't do anymore, now that Google is freely available and instantly useful, is the "answers" concept. While Yahoo!
 Answers, for example, is still used, it's usually because it's 
entertaining and weird, not because you expect any real answers. When 
you want actual information, you go to Web sites established to discuss 
your specific area of interest. You use social networking to ask the 
people you know and trust. Once again, we see an obsolete model -- a 
universal tip line, answering any question you might have -- to a 
version more closely mirroring our actual, real-world experience.

But
 what was it? Several companies – such as ChaCha and AskJeeves -- were 
built along the lines described above: Ask a question, about anything, 
and get an answer back. It's a way of getting other people to Google 
things for you (which to my mind sounds insane). Where these concepts, 
and Google Answers, go wrong is in monetizing the concept. Asking 
somebody to Google something for you is bad netiquette, certainly -- but
 it's also stupid business. To make things worse, Answers used an 
auction-house model, paying whichever freelancer could be bothered at 
the given price to provide the answer.

Silly now, when your 
browser will automatically give you search results and Google's powerful
 engines make ever better attempts at giving you the correct ones, but 
in the transitional time before Google became second nature to all of us
 -- from April 2002 to November 2006, to be specific -- it served a 
purpose [source: Fikes and Baugher].


 

  
   
Google’s online advertising program has been a huge 
success, so it was natural to think that a similar approach might work 
offline.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


8: Google Print Ads and Google Radio Ads
Picking up on that pesky "monetize the Internet" theme, we have 
Google's forays into non-Internet advertising. Perhaps influenced by 
ongoing pressure to show revenue, Google attempted to expand its brand 
into the print and radio
 advertising industries. With its astounding user-information and 
product-purchase metrics, Google could do for offline concerns what they
 did (and continue to do) for online advertisers: Bring potential 
customer information to the people that need it.

Of course, 
Google's private and personal consumer information is its bread and 
butter and probably will be for the foreseeable future. In a world where
 all the information ever created by humans is quickly becoming 
instantly available, advertising continues to be the dominant profit paradigm.

While
 using Google metrics to target consumers in offline markets – which is 
exactly what happened -- may sound like a good deal for offline 
advertisers, those methods of communicating with consumers are dying. 
The metrics Google uses to perfectly identify the right market for ad 
placements online just didn't translate to the offline world. Tracking 
the success of Google's ad placements proved difficult, and both radio 
and print executives were reluctant to turn over their advertising 
systems to Google's methods [source: Vascellaro].


 

  
   
After leaving Google in frustration in 2007, Dennis 
Crowley went on to develop the immensely popular Foursquare, which 
enables users to find nearby friends, retailers and deals. 

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


7: Dodgeball
In 2005, two Google acquisitions in particular stick out: Android, 
and Dodgeball. Android, of course, has no place being discussed in this 
article. But Dodgeball is more interesting, as the first case on our 
list of Google acquiring and developing an idea that eventually 
succeeded elsewhere, becoming the current standard.

Dodgeball was a
 location-specific social networking site and was acquired, along with 
cofounder Dennis Crowley, in May 2005 [source: Seigler].
 Again, we see the forward-thinking merge between online and real-world 
life, as applications like this use smartphone technology to connect us,
 tout our social experiences and favorite locations, and send out all 
manner of food portraiture to everyone we know. Perfect Google 
situation, right?

So what happened? Well, nothing. For two years, that is, until Crowley left Google in frustration and founded Foursquare.
 The blame here rests in the fact that the idea was too prescient, that 
the hardware took too long to catch up to the idea, but catch up it did.
 Now, of course, Google's got Latitude, and Facebook's Places may take 
the Foursquare crown as the check-in app of choice.

Of course, 
neither of those latter apps have what made Foursquare such a hit -- the
 gamification aspect, in which demonstrated loyalty to a given business 
or location results in various badges and bells -- but if we follow our 
"real world parallel" model, it seems those extra features won't really 
matter as much moving forward.

Users check in now because that's 
just what you do. It's not to get a virtual treat; checking in is faster
 and easier than tweeting or Facebooking our location to our friends. 
And with location mapping becoming a standard part of photo apps like 
Instagram, the concept of the check-in itself has morphed itself into 
closer approximation of what the connected life has become: The augmentation, rather than the replacement, of reality.


 

  
   
When Google announced in late 2011 that it was 
shutting down the Jaiku service for good, a group of dedicated users set
 up an archiving system so account holders could preserve the 
conversations and content from the social site.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


6: Jaiku
Google acquired microblogging site Jaiku in October 2007, but by 
January 2009, it was clear that Twitter was the official winner in the 
short post race [source: Kincaid].
 A social network is only as powerful as the users themselves, and 
Twitter was already well on its way by the time of this acquisition.

The
 divorce between Google and Jaiku is surrounded by rumors of internal 
bad blood, but either way, this Finnish import -- so-named because the 
microblogging aspect makes its messages look like haiku -- was 
open-source after 2009. In 2011, Google announced that it was shutting 
down Jaiku for good, effective Jan. 15, 2012 [source: Horowitz]. Perhaps in the same way that the MySpace
 graveyard has over the years become a home-base headquarters for 
smaller unknown bands -- a development presaged by MySpace's 
music-integration technology, which still sets it apart from most social
 networks that aren't actively concerned with music -- it could have 
become something new. Now, we'll never know.


 

  
   
The Google Notebook team posted their last blog on Jan. 14, 2009.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


5: Google Notebook and Shared Stuff
While Google Docs
 has become the shared-document service that Google Wave (more on this 
coming up) partially wanted to be, the company's never come up with an 
application that can compete with apps like Evernote for the 
getting-things-done crowd. Cutting and pasting clips that retain their 
Web citation seems like a sure thing -- especially when integrated with 
the browser itself -- which is why Google has tried it so many times.

And
 even so, at the end of the day, the learning curve or feature load has 
either been too high, or the interface has been too clunky. The world of
 squirreled-away factlets and quotations remains firmly under the regime
 of those app developers with the leanest extensions and the simplest 
features. When everything's in the cloud,
 being able to port your notes and tasks and links from home to phone to
 office is no longer a selling point. (And again, we see the theme of 
seamless integration of the tech until you can't see it anymore.)

Likewise,
 the improbably named Shared Stuff tried to work the Google Docs and 
Google Notebook angles by making those clips and notes available to 
everybody [source: Pash].
 The development had problems -- it's been called buggy, and it never 
really integrated into the Google world -- but the result was just a 
less-fun version of social bookmarking sites like Delicio.us, which 
privileged the "social" aspect of the concept into its own activity: 
Social bookmarking is exactly what it sounds like, whether it takes the 
form of Delicio.us, Reddit or even BuzzFeed. What's important isn't so 
much what you share, but what you and your friends have to say about it.
 (Those are the aspects of Notebook and Shared Stuff that were 
integrated into Google Reader.)


 

  
   
In retrospect, most people view Google Buzz as an evolutionary step toward Google Plus.

©iStockphoto.com/Giorgio Magini


4: Google Buzz
The first thing Google Buzz did wrong was sneak up on users. In February of 2010, it was automatically added to Gmail, as an opt-outservice that sneakily appeared as a folder in the comfy old Inbox without warning.

So
 what was inside that spooky new folder? It was Google Reader, in 
essence, which was a great experience during the time it was most-used 
-- before, that is, RSS
 as a Web standard gave way to personally-curated tablet readers 
(including Google Currents) and similar app-based ways of keeping track 
of our favorite sites. Which was a transition that was already underway 
when Buzz appeared, so Google's initiative basically amounted to (or 
would, over the next year) just another folder with a continually rising
 "Unread" count, with all the subconscious stress that entails.

Perhaps
 if Google Buzz had incorporated some sort of reward for getting through
 those -- formerly enjoyable! -- updates from our favorite sites, it 
would have done better. In any case, the tablet revolution has brought 
the cycle back around: Now, we read magazines on something shaped like a
 magazine, rather than reading blog posts on something shaped like our 
e-mail. In late 2011, Google put Buzz out to pasture [source: Wasserman].


 

  
   
Google was hoping that SideWiki’s shared knowledge approach to Web browsing would engage users.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


3: Wikipedia Alternatives
The past can get a little fuzzy, but most of us remember that time 
right before Wikipedia's debut when "wiki" was its own dominant concept.
 Television 
fandoms and other information-rich communities still maintain wikis full
 of user-edited and -confirmed facts about the things that they love. 
What makes Wikipedia special is the size and devotion of its community; 
despite what your high school English teacher has to say about it, the 
fact that "anybody" can edit Wikipedia pages doesn't necessarily make 
the information invalid. All accepted knowledge is written by committee,
 as they say.

And what does that have to do with Google? 
SearchWiki, Knol and SideWiki, that's what. A whole sequence of 
Wikipedia add-ons and alternatives, developed by Google since the summer
 of 2008. Couldn't beat 'em (Knol, a collection of user-written 
articles), couldn't join 'em (SearchWiki, which enabled users to sort 
and annotate search results), finally gave up (SideWiki, a browser 
extension to annotate Web pages).

Any
 attempt at a "Wikipedia killer" -- even one administrated by 
user-beloved Google -- was never going to measure up in sheer 
crowdsourcing power, and Knol shuttered in May of 2012 [source: Albanesius].
 Perhaps if there had been any outstanding problems in the Wikipedia 
interface, Knol would have had a shot, but the fact is that Wikipedia's 
pretty solid, offering enough usefulness to every level of user -- from 
the novice, to experts on the very subjects they're reading about, which
 is pretty amazing if you think about it -- that everyone is welcome 
both to search and to provide the information being searched, often at 
once.

As for SearchWiki, users seemed reluctant to mess with 
Google's organic search results, so it was replaced with a star system 
in late 2010. [source: Dupont].
 In SideWiki's case, users never really took to the use of a sidebar to 
comment on Web pages, and Google pulled the plug in September 2011 
[source: Eustace].


 

  
   
Competing against the already-established YouTube didn’t go so well for Google Video.

©iStockphoto.com/Günay Mutlu


2: Google Video
Google Video attempted to crush YouTube
 using merely its beautifully lean interface, its whipsmart programming 
... and the complete lack of any need for something that already exists.
 Again, we see the crowdsourced chaos of a Wikipedia in YouTube, with 
user-administrated levels of appreciation and reputation bringing the 
cream to the surface. While Google Videos (plural, totally different 
name), Google Video's successor, is still a storehouse for certain video
 streams, it's taken the more tightly curated route of sites like its 
early partner Vimeo. And of course, Google eventually bought YouTube 
anyway, to the tune of $1.65 billion in stock. So it all worked out.

The
 story of Google Video isn't merely that of an unprovoked attack on an 
Internet behemoth, though. The truth is much stranger. In January 2005, 
the roots of what would become Google Video first debuted, turning television broadcasts
 into searchable transcripts. By summer of that year, they started 
supporting video uploads and sharing, and by the end of its first year 
of life it has lost the original transcript idea altogether (although as
 of 2012, it's available for some video on YouTube, which implies 
Google's not done entirely with this concept).

Whatever slim 
chance the site might have had, whatever improvements or fun 
user-experience innovations that might have put it over the top (like 
Facebook's clean interface did, for example, once upon a time), Google 
Video decided to go another way: by introducing a proprietary file type 
and player, drastically increasing the amount of "stuff" you had to do 
in order to create or enjoy content on the site. Sometimes this works --
 all file extensions and media players came from somewhere, right? -- 
but it's not a great strategy when you've started a fight with a 
perfectly useable site like YouTube, whose popularity has already made 
it the standard. And certainly not when portability between devices and 
screens had already become the new measure of a killer app.

After 
the YouTube acquisition, and having failed at becoming the rebranded 
name of the service, Google Video changed shape once again, this time 
into a video rental service (once again, heading into competition with 
the guy that already won, in this case Netflix). Now it's back to its 
form as a YouTube analogue -- which is good news to anybody who already 
has content hosted there. A static collection of videos, now that 
they've disabled uploading, will stand as testament to the brief time 
Google Video filled a need -- over a billion dollars later -- for its 
community. At least until they've folded back into YouTube, presumably.


 

  
   
This image from a video Google produced to explain 
Wave's features was intended to communicate the way that it could serve 
as a sort of group e-mail experience.

Screen capture by HowStuffWorks staff


1: Google Wave
Perhaps the most famous Google failure, Wave also bears the 
distinction of being the biggest Google failure. A collection of 
unnecessary features bundled together in unnecessary -- and often 
bewildering – ways, Google Wave tried to be everything to everyone in 
terms of content sharing, in the same way that Google+
 is attempting to take over the social realm. And while it's not yet 
certain whether Google+ will flatline, the time to mourn Wave has come 
and gone.

Want to send an e-mail? You already have Gmail, but if for some reason you'd like to send that e-mail
 to a hard-to-understand list of people through a counterintuitive 
process, Wave can help. Would you like to turn that e-mail into a song, 
or a video, or a conversation about songs and videos that itself 
contains and is made of those things? Want to juggle people coming in 
and out of that conversation, never quite sure to whom you're talking or
 whether they've been following the conversation the whole time? Want 
the always-on capability to form sidebar conversations alongside the 
main conversation, creating a constant -- and possibly valid -- paranoia
 that everybody is talking about you behind your back? Would you like to
 take all the most irritating lags and social awkwardness of chat rooms 
and combine them -- along with the worst things about online 
document-collaboration, online flame wars and awkward parties where your
 work friends meet your regular friends -- into a single application 
that none of those people know how to use either?

Of course, it 
wasn't really that bad. What gets left out of this story is the fact 
that -- like most Apple products, like most presidents -- the 
anticipation of a product release can easily overshadow any actual 
value. If we've paid enough money and gotten enough usefulness out of a 
so-so project, we'll swear the Emperor is wearing the best clothes in 
town. But if the product is free, or we feel defeated by it, then it 
becomes the worst thing that has ever happened.

Google Wave is no 
different. It made its debut through the "invite" system that was in 
vogue in 2009, like the tremendous Google Voice, and like Voice, it 
spread into the culture through the people most likely to turn backflips
 on release day, and of course most likely to talk about it for at least
 the two weeks either side. A risky strategy, for a project with no 
broad-spectrum use that would take more than those two weeks to learn, 
even for a hard-headed Google fanatic. Even as performance art, or a 
joke.

The fact is, even seasoned programmers can have trouble 
explaining to the layman why Wave was so unloved. Part of it is the 
complexity of code language, the precise reasons that it failed to 
integrate with other Google features and suites, that don't enter into 
here. And part -- likely most -- of it is that anticipation-backlash 
effect. But perhaps the "right place, wrong time" aspect is also in 
play. Whatever features users liked in Wave will likely make their way 
into a future project or acquisition. Those pieces of the broken and 
abandoned products that make up Google's Island of Misfit Toys can 
always be picked up, dusted off and integrated into a new configuration.


 


Lots More Information

Author's Note
I've been a Google fan for a 
long time, so that -- plus my incredibly short attention span -- made me
 very interested to dig into their very fertile creative past. While I 
can't say I remember having heard of every item on this list, what's 
fascinating is seeing the details and features of these projects, now 
evolved, present in more mainstream successes. You can't keep a good 
idea down, even when it comes as part of a larger, less successful 
venture. Kind of inspiring, I think.


Related Articles
10 Useful Google Tools
Top 5 Myths About Google, Inc.
How The Google Chrome Browser Works
How Google Voice Works
Top 5 Myths About The Internet
10 Future Home Innovations... That Weren't
Top 5 Myths About Microsoft
Top 10 Star Trek Technologies That Came True


More Great Links
Google Answers FAQ
Google Notebook FAQ
Google Knol FAQ


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