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.
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). 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.
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
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
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. 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 foundedFoursquare. 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.
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 . 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 . 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.
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 . 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.)
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
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. Televisionfandoms 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. 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. 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
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.
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 thatGoogle+ 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.
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