10 Best Services Killed by Google
Google has a long history of adoption, then oblivion, and finally official destruction of its products. More recently, this included Google Spaces , a service that most of us never knew existed. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services that Google has destroyed over the years.
10. Google Live Feed
Google’s Live Feed was introduced in 2010 and quickly discontinued in 2011. The Live Feed was basically a Facebook clone that also integrated with your email for some reason. You can share photos, videos and links directly with your contacts or the general public.
Buzz died a quick death because it was unclear what you should be using it for, but it laid the foundation for a number of improvements with its competitor, Facebook . Google+ followed suit as its own replacement for Google Buzz a few years later, but even that hardly holds true for now.
9. Picnic
Picnik was a free online photo editing tool that made it easy to make minor changes to photos without the need for desktop software. After uploading the photos, you can easily adjust the brightness, color and more, and then save the edited image back to your hard drive.
These types of services are quite common these days . Even when Picnik died in 2012, the best replacement was Google+’s own Google Photos , which Google replaced with the much better, privacy-focused Google Photos . If you are more into mobile photo editing, you have many good options on both Android and iPhone .
8. Picasa
Speaking of photo management, Picasa , Google’s desktop photo library tool, was one of our favorite ways to organize your digital photos until Google decided to kill it in 2016 . The good news is that most of Picasa’s functionality has been carried over to Google Photos.
While Google Photos lacks the desktop controls that Picasa did, the online version may well replace it. That’s a good thing because, with the exception of Apple Photos, there really aren’t many desktop photo management apps.
7. Google Answers
Google killed Google Answers back in 2006. Unlike current competitors like Stack Exchange , Quora, and the always shrewd Yahoo Answers , Google Answers has encouraged good responses by offering cash payments.
When a user asked a question in Google responses, they could also advertise a reward of between $ 2 and $ 200. If you liked a well-crafted answer, you would pay and add a tip to that. Before Google Answers, Google had a similar service called Google Questions and Answers, where you emailed a question to Google employees and they answered it for $ 3. While Quora – the best substitute, there is no money, but services like Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk, use a similar approach if you are looking for someone who will hold for you study.
6. Google Wave
Google Wave existed from 2010 to 2012 and was one of the company’s most ambitious failures. However, Wave was too ambitious as no one knew how to use a collaboration tool for email, instant messaging, document, wiki, forum, blogging. Once Google put an end to Wave, Apache took over some of the protocols , but nothing came of it.
As confusing as Wave is to most users, it laid the foundation for a number of now popular services, including Slack and Discord , which are the closest modern-day counterparts to Wave’s chat systems. If you are lacking in Wave’s document collaboration features, you have many alternatives in Google Drive , Dropbox, or Office .
5. Google Helpouts
Google Helpouts is a service that connects you with real video chat experts . Helpouts lasted almost two years. Basically, it was a video version of something like Quora, but with lively questions and answers.
The main idea behind Helpouts was to connect you, the average human Google user, with an expert so you can ask questions live. Some of these Helpouts channels cost money, but most were free, so they ultimately failed. That said, it was useful in theory, and being able to ask experts about everything from home renovations to Photoshop was appealing.
There is no set of alternatives that work just as Helpouts, but Clarity.fm similar to if you need help with start-ups, and our own series of ” Ask the Expert ” perfect fit , provided that the theme of the week will be helpful.
4. Google Notepad
Google discontinued the Google Notebook in 2012, but it has lived a long and fulfilling life by Google standards . As the name suggests, Google Notebook was an online note-taking platform where you could store notes and even add clippings from the Internet , provided that you were using Firefox or Internet Explorer. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s basically Evernote .
The good news is that replacements are a dime a dozen. Google Notebook may have been one of the first online note-taking apps, but nowadays Evernote, OneNote, Simplenote, and Google Keep are filling the void. While all modern options have far surpassed Google Notebook, it still holds a special place in our hearts as one of the first good options.
3. Google Lab
Writing about strange experimental features in Google Labs has been bread and butter for Lifehacker for a very long time. Google Lab allowed the general public to test all sorts of strange new Google features and apps across its various services, from Google Calendar to Google Chrome .
While the main landing page for Google Labs is gone, the spirit lives on in one way or another. Chrome has its experimental flags, and Gmail still has a lot of experimental options built in . Google Labs may be technically dead, but that doesn’t mean the company still doesn’t release weird, random new apps before quickly forgetting about them.
2.iGoogle
iGoogle , which was originally launched as Google’s personalized homepage, performed well in 2005-2013, and the Internet mourned his death with surprising desperation . iGoogle was a completely personalized home page that could be customized as you like, something that is long gone in the age of algorithms.
However, you still have a few options. As of now, myYahoo is still around , igHome looks almost identical to iGoogle, and Netvibes is the most modern of them all.
1. Google Reader
On July 1, 2013, the Internet lost one of its most trusted companions: Google Reader . The RSS Reader, which millions have counted on since 2005, has disappeared and replaced it with a hole in the shape of radio waves in our hearts.
Well, here’s a few dozen more replacement services. Feedly is still gaining traction and is the best Reader alternative, although there are plenty of other alternatives worth looking at like Feeder , The Old Reader, and Digg Reader .