Google, like any large company, has had its share of failed products and services. Just this week, Google has shut down some of its products, including Google Video, Google Mini, and iGoogle.
With the beta culture still alive and well within Google, it’s also easy for half-baked concepts to make their way to a public beta release. Since Google products are always being experimented with and iterated on, many users of niche products can be left out in the cold when Google decides to abandon them. Take Google Wave, for example. Wave was touted as the service that would replace email, and combined Most of the good features of Wave have been rolled into Gmail and Google Drive, but, as a concept, Google Wave was a failure. When Wave was killed, many users who “got” it were sad to see it go
Now, a Pinterest collection of all the services and products that have been killed off by Google has popped up on Pinterest. Dubbed the “Google Graveyard,” the software showcased in the collection shows just how a company as large and popular as Google can also sometimes fail. Of course, some of the products are also startups that Google has acquired, then unceremoniously killed off. Also, as some of the commenters to the Pins point out, many of the products have been rolled into other services. Google Video, for example, has had its collection combined with YouTube, and Google Patent Search is still available through a normal Google Search.
Some of the highlights in the Google Graveyard are products that were released with much fanfare from Google. In addition to Google Video and Wave, Google Buzz and Google Desktop stand out as products Google had high hopes for. Buzz was Google’s failed attempt at a Twitter-like microblogging service, which ended up as a repository of tweets pushed from Twitter. Google Desktop was Google’s local indexing service and desktop search bar. Google claimed the move to more cloud-based storage was what made Desktop obsolete.