Another AR failure, Daydream succeeded Google’s dirt-cheap Cardboard headset, which let you experience the emerging technology through a $15 box and your smartphone. Daydream was a dressed-up version of Cardboard with a premium and much more comfortable design. It just didn’t bring anything new in the way of functionality: Daydream was still just a holster for your phone so you could keep it a few inches from your face while viewing AR apps.

The goal wasn’t for Daydream to be the end all be all of AR technology, but rather, an introduction for the masses to experience augmented reality and convince them of its worth. It’s just that $79 is a lot to ask for a glorified tech demo. It didn’t help that the headset was only compatible at launch with Google Pixel and Moto Z and that there were few compelling apps to try out. In the end, Daydream was a fine piece of hardware; it was simply too little, too late.

I considered copying and pasting the previous slide, but I couldn’t write this article without telling you about the short life of Google Buzz. And I mean short. Google Buzz was announced on February 9, 2010, and was subsequently shut down on December 15, 2011. It lived long enough to be hit with a class-action lawsuit from users who thought the launch of Buzz was a violation of Gmail users’ privacy.

Among various concerns, the potential public display of “follower/following” lists “appeared to divulge a Gmail user’s most frequent email contacts without sufficient consent.” Google also got a slap on the wrist from the FCC, which charged the company with Deceptive Privacy Practices for not letting users fully opt-out of the social app, which was integrated into Gmail at launch.

Google quickly made changes to Buzz to address some of these concerns, but the social app meant to contend against Facebook and Twitter was already doomed. Buzz had lost any goodwill associated with being a Google product and was eventually replaced by Google+ before hitting its two-year anniversary.

Now we’re onto failed social network number…I’ve lost count. Google+ was undoubtedly the most ambitious attempt to take on Facebook. Its emergence led, in part, to the closure of Orkut (another failed social app), Buzz, and Google Friend Connect. Determined to finally break into the market, Google poured all of its resources into Google+ in the hopes of attracting Android, YouTube, and Chrome users to a single platform.

Google+ wanted to be the next Facebook, the one app you use to communicate with friends, post photos, and find news. It organized its main tabs into Profile, Hangouts, Photos, Circles, Streams (friend groups), and more. Streams were like Facebook news updates for Circles, which were groups of people organized into categories (like subreddits, in a way). There were also options for video group chats and group text messaging. Unfortunately, Google+ never scaled up like its competitors and was the subject of two significant data leaks prior to its shutdown.

Though it ultimately failed, the platform survived longer than Google’s previous efforts, vanishing in 2019 after a seven-year run. The only remnant of Google+ is Google Currents, an app for corporate communications that, you guessed it, is set to shut down next year.

If you can’t beat them, buy them. Google Video was an in-house effort to take on YouTube, the leading free video-sharing platform at the time (and still today). Launched in 2005, Google Video allowed videos to be uploaded onto Google servers and embedded onto other websites. Along with amateur videos, the platform was meant to host commercial professional media, like TV shows and movies. Despite allowing free uploads for a wide range of formats, Google Video couldn’t keep up with YouTube and amassed only 2.8 million uploads in its seven years of existence.

When Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it all but signaled the demise of Google’s own video site. However, it was a slow, agonizing death for the platform. Within months, Google began merging Video with YouTube, but it wasn’t until 2009 that it stopped uploads. Google Video lived on for another two years before Google shut it down for good.

I’m taking a bit of a liberty here, considering Project Ara was never released to the public. However, its disappearance was as disappointing as seeing a gorgeous concept supercar at an auto show only for it to be released as a station wagon. Ara, a prototype smartphone, was all about modularity, or the ability to swap out parts for others. Much like the very real Framework Laptop, the vision for Project Ara was for modules and components to be sold on the marketplace so users could upgrade their phones without buying a new one.

It was essentially a smartphone built from Lego-like bricks that could be easily swapped out. You could have theoretically removed a camera module for a newer one or kept an extra swappable battery on hand. Even more niche add-ons were proposed, like medical monitors or gaming accessories. The benefits of Ara were clear, but despite promising to send out developer units in the fall of 2016, Google decided instead to shut down its development.

Search for any subject on Google and one of the first, if not the first, entry will be from Wikipedia. If Google had its way, a search would instead have led you to Knol. Much like Wikipedia, Knol compiled user-written articles on a wide range of topics and promised contributors a revenue stream. That is, if you wrote content worth reading, you could have made some cash from it. Google just didn’t put much effort into the website, and without the proper resources, Knol faded into the background as Wikipedia grew its database empire.

About four years after launching Knol, Google announced that knols (a unit of knowledge) would no longer be viewable, and urged content creators to download and export them. On October 1, 2012, the service was dissolved.

One million points to anyone reading this who made a virtual space in Google Lively (the points don’t matter, obviously). Considered a potential rival to Second Life (which remains popular to this day), Lively was a browser-based (IE and Firefox) digital 3D world where you could access information or chat with others by entering a room. Up to 20 people could be in a room at any point, where their avatars could communicate via cartoon-style bubbles.

The real appeal to Lively is that a room could be embedded onto a website much like a YouTube video. So a forum about soccer could consist of you entering a virtual soccer field to chat with jersey-wearing sports fans about the lame Champions League Final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. It just never caught on, and based on this scathing op-ed from Slate, we should all be glad.

The ironically named Google Lively survived a brief four months before being completely shut down. It never got out of beta and had only 10,000 active users when it was canceled.

Pay for answers? No way! That’s why we have Google. Or, erm, wait, you mean Google wants me to pay? It did with Google Answers, a service that let people submit questions to experts for a fee. You could submit a question and specify how much you were willing to pay for answers (from $2 to $200). One of 500 researchers would then be selected by Google to work on your question. It stuck around for a few years, but Answers never reached the popularity of Yahoo. In the end, people looked for free answers from an open community, not thoroughly researched ones from people who are well-versed on a subject. It all sounds a bit familiar.