Favorite product that got shut down?
Trying to launch a search fund to acquire VC backed businesses that couldn't scale. Would love your recommendations and get on a mission to revive a favorite product of this community.
Google Reader. I believe this decision lead to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and consequently the fall of western civilization.
For me it was del.icio.us which used to be free but became supplanted by a paid service once acquired by Pinboard.
I know there's the "synced bookmarks" feature of various browsers but:
a) I don't want to be trapped to one browser because the same browser isn't necessarily the best experience on different devices
b) del.icio.us had superior capabilities for tagging and finding links
StumbleUpon. Every click brought you to a different website, depending on your preferences and voting.
The Infinite Scroll Algorithm used in today's TikTok/Facebook/Reddit is similar, but too sterile because it's all hosted in the same place and hence subject to roughly the same community constraints.
StumbleUpon separated the recommendation engine from the hosting, which I find a lot more valuable. Unfortunately I think there are not enough interesting and independent websites around anymore for that.
Picasa - The offline photo management program. The last version might still be around for download, but once you have multiple faces tagged in a photo, it randomly swap them... a nasty bug, which now can't ever be fixed.
I really liked Google Inbox.
I went from Gmail to Inbox and then Google pushed me back to Gmail...
Many have said this before, but it would be really cool if there was a law or something that would encourage our motivate companies that go bankrupt or get shutdown to open source their code or product.
Google Talk! It was XMPP but no one knew or cared and it was fast and simple and built into Gmail so all your cool artist friends could talk together and all the chats were saved to your Gmail inbox so you could reminisce even years later on the abundance of young wide-eyed youth.
Keybase. Should be a non profit like signal. Dump the messaging and file storage, just do cryptographic identity attestation, proofing, verification.
I know it's a meme, but I genuinely miss Google Reader. It was so nice to have many sources of information aggregated into one app. Now it's fragmented across HN, Reddit, Substack, Twitter etc etc. I don't even bother following it all anymore.
Inbox by Gmail. Bundles were great. The ability to view just the pinned emails was very useful for prioritization. And you could enter your own reminders instead of sending an email to yourself. Some of the other features (like email snoozing) made it into the main Gmail product.
Also, I miss Windows Phone. I was really hoping that one of the alternative OSes that were floating around 2014 or so would make significant inroads into the US phone market. Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish, Firefox OS, Tizen, Plasma Mobile. I got to try several of these! That was an interesting time.
Cool Edit Pro. Bought by adobe, neutered, and released as Adobe audition. Audacity doesn't come close. I think most people moved to flstudio. I just stopped writing music once my last copy started acting up. I have it on a VM for doing batch processing, but I can't use it in real time anymore.
I also miss the macOS 8/9 version of graphic converter. It had a "send to folder" feature that made sorting huge directories of pictures very easy, and usable in group settings, like on a projector with a group of a half dozen or more.
There's more, but not having access to those two sticks in my craw.
BlackBerry qwerty phones and the solid qnx based OS (bb10)
Parse
(bought by Facebook, shutdown and later open-sourced after major community outcry)
Rdio. Still miss it every day.
Weather Spark used to be my favorite weather website. It had an interactive plot displaying a bunch weather data, historical, forecasted, historical min/max, and historical standard deviations. This was all in a side-by-side pane with a map view that showed radar data and temperature measurements at individual stations, and you could click different stations to see all of their historical data. It was the best interface to view forecasts and get a sense for how the recent weather stacks up against past years, IMO.
I have not seen any other weather site that comes close to it. The WeatherSpark team made a post to explain why they had to drop the old interface, but I forget the reasons now. The new interface is nothing like the old one -- static plots with buttons to switch to past dates / years, similar to Wunderground.
Fitbit Zip ... a tiny, belt-clip step counter that worked with Bluetooth and had a 30 day battery life. I don't want to wear a watch or ring or rely on my phone and I don't want to constantly charge another device, but I still want to count steps.
MiiVerse/WaraWara Plaza - Nintendo's awesome pseudo-social-network for the 3DS and Wii U; twitter was (and is) a vastly inferior non-replacement.
StreetPass - Nintendo's strange and clever system for sharing Mii characters, short greetings, and game data via ad hoc peer-to-peer wifi and asynchronous relay; reason enough to take your 3DS everywhere just in case you might get a streetpass! (Technically StreetPass still works but the Nintendo Zone relay stations have been shut down and the 3DS has been discontinued.)
PlayStation Home - Sony's largely pointless, generally unpopular - but free! - proto-metaverse for the PS3 that never made it out of beta but lumbered on, zombie-like, for several oddly fun years.
Firefox send!
For those looking for an alternative, wormhole.app seems nice
I used Google Allo frequently to communicate with peers privately. Then it became just another messaging app that Google axed.
What.cd music discovery died for new after that. I can’t find New music anymore and never seen to branch out into new sounds
Probably hangouts.
Despite it's rather ugly/unmodernized interface, it had a lot going for it. Chat with people or text them, all from the same little box. Call anyone, by number or by email. Video conferencing/screensharing worked solidly.
WiMax WISPs. They were a potentially interesting competitor to cellular (and potentially cable ISPs) that focused on delivering simple wireless WAN internet connectivity rather than full-fat phone company service.
Helped me improve my understanding of last codebase and their design
UNIX workstations: Sun Ultra, HP-PA workstations.
modulus.io
Back in 2015, I was on the bus crossing Bay Bridge and one my team mates said out site is down. AWS had major issues with infrastructure. I logged in to Modulus on my phone and took down all containers in AWS and brought them up on GCP. Our web app was back and running within a minute. It was intuitive, cheap, and cross cloud providers out of the box. I still can’t find anything close to that.
YOu can find many examples for that in the 3D tooling world (not sure about VC details though). Caligari trueSpace, for example.
screenhero.
best pairing app ever made. Slack bought them, shut it down and failed to deliver anything close to what it did
I used Google Squared constantly for about six months before its death.
timeful! God the app had such a good interface for managing your day. Why did Google have to buy and shut it down!!!!
Europa Universalis: Magna Mundi