More from The Google graveyard: all the products Google has shut down
Almost four years after the search giant stopped letting people buy digital magazines through Google News, the company is removing its magazine-reading feature entirely. After December 18th, you’ll no longer be able to access magazines purchased via the Google News apps or news.google.com, meaning you’ll have to export them if you ever want to read them again. Consider this your PSA.
[support.google.com]
I feel Epic CEO Tim Sweeney very strongly on this. But there’s an way for web browsing to feel much less horrible: RSS.
What if, say, a big internet company facing an existential crisis and growing trust issues decided to reverse its mistake and bring the beloved product back? What if they built in — I don’t know, not like they’ve ever done this before — a way to pay creators?
Imagine the goodwill Google would get just by trying it.
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
As commenter Chefgon points out, there was a Nexus Q before the Project Q PlayStation handheld Sony revealed this week.
Last year Chris Welch revisited that whole experience for us and explains how the $299 Nexus Q player stumbled in 2012 just before Google scored a hit with the Chromecast in 2013.
You remember Google Currents, right? The enterprise community feature that replaced Google Plus (RIP) is scheduled to join the Google Graveyard this summer, and now we know exactly when that will happen.
Beginning July 5, 2023, Currents will no longer be available. Workspace administrators can export Currents data using Takeout before August 8, 2023. Beginning August 8th, Currents data will no longer be available for download.
Bonus ten points if you remember that this isn’t even the first discarded Google project to use the name Google Currents — the name had already been used for a magazine-ish tablet app (RIP) in the early 2010s.
As reported by TechCrunch, Duplex on the Web, which could automate things like buying movie tickets on a website, is officially deprecated and “will no longer be supported,” Google writes on a support page. I honestly didn’t know this service existed, which might speak to why Google is shutting it down.
The AI-powered reservation tool made famous in a splashy Google I/O presentation is still around, though.
The Nexus Q had a standout design, but everything else about it was a miss
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