7 Google Projects That Failed Big Time!

Google is definitely a winner in majority of its business ventures. Be it Search, Android or Chrome, Google is indeed the biggest tech giant! But does it always succeed? Well, not really. Here we bring to you 7 Google projects that failed big time, and there are many more unlisted. Moral of the story: even multiple failures are never the end of any voyage! Move on, explore and win!

1. Google Lively: Google Lively is one apt example of "right idea, wrong implementation". One reason why many have not even heard about it is the fact that it lasted only for six months in 2008. It held a similar concept than that of "Second Life" and carried a similar non-game virtual environments.

2. Google Answers: Another failure of Google especially termed as failure because a similar concept from Yahoo, the Yahoo answer is still being read and flourished like any thing, so wonder what stopped Google's project?

Well who would pay for something that could be researched on internet. Google answer allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25 per cent of the researcher's reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100. In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service (except for the Hong Kong version), and it was fully closed to new activity by late December 2006, although its archives remain available.

3. Dodgeball: Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software provider for mobile devices. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby. Dodgeball was founded in 2000 by New York University students Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert. The company was acquired by Google in 2005. In April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google, with Crowley describing their experience there as "incredibly frustrating". After leaving Google, Crowley created a similar service known as Foursquare with the help of Naveen Selvadurai.

In January 2009, Vic Gundotra, vice president of Engineering at Google, announced that the company would "discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available." Dodgeball was shut down and was replaced in February 2009 by Google Latitude.

4. Jaiku: Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter. It was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.

On January 14, 2009, it was announced that Google would be open-sourcing the product but would "no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase" leaving development to a "passionate volunteer team of Googlers". On March 12, 2009, Jaiku was re-launched on Google's App Engine platform and on March 13, 2009 the source code to JaikuEngine (the open source equivalent of the jaiku.com codebase) was released.

On October 14, 2011, Google announced they decided to shut down the Jaiku services by January 15, 2012.

5. Google Notebook: Google Notebook was a free online application offered by Google that allowed users to save and organize clips of information while conducting research online. The browser-based tool permitted a user to write notes, clip text and images, and save links from pages during a browser session. The information was saved to an online "notebook" with sharing and collaboration features. Notebooks could be made "public", or visible to others, and also could be used to collaborate with a list of users (either publicly or privately). On Jan 14, 2009, Google announced that they were stopping development on the service. However, Google Notebook users could continue to use the service. Almost immediately, Evernote launched a Google notebook importer on Jan 22, 2009.

In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Notebook. On November 11, 2011, Google began exporting the contents of existing Notebooks to Google Docs, and made Google Notebooks read-only. As of July 2012, all Notebook data had been exported and Google Notebook was shut down.

On March 20, 2013, Google launched its new note-taking application Google Keep.

6. Google Video: Google Videos (originally Google Video) was a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allowed for websites to host large amounts of video remotely without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.

The service was launched on January 25, 2005. On October 9, 2006, Google bought former competitor YouTube. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads. In 2009, Google discontinued the ability to upload videos to Google's web servers.

Google Videos was shut down on August 20, 2012. The Google Videos content was automatically moved to YouTube.

7. Google Wave: Google Wave was a web-based computing platform and communications protocol designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

It was announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009 and was initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. Google accepted most requests submitted starting November 29, 2009, soon after the September extended release of the technical preview. On May 19, 2010, it was released to the general public.

On August 4, 2010, Google announced the suspension of stand-alone Wave development and the intent of maintaining the web site at least for the remainder of the year and on November 22, 2011, announced that existing Waves would become read-only in January 2012 and all Waves would be deleted in April 2012.

Google Wave was accepted by the Apache Software Foundation's Incubator program under the project name Apache Wave. The Google Wave Developer blog was updated with news of the change on December 6, 2010.

Wikipedia