Internet & Tech
Platforms, devices and digital services that briefly changed how the internet felt.
104 verified storiesApple AirPower
Apple announced it, pictured it on packaging—and never sold a single one.
Google Glass Explorer Edition
The public could buy it—but what they bought was always an experiment.
Google+
Consumer versionIt was threaded through millions of Google accounts, then removed from the consumer internet.
Microsoft Kin
It officially went on sale. Microsoft ended it just 48 days later.
Vine
Six-second loops shaped an internet language. Then uploads—and later much of the archive—disappeared.
Loon
Project LoonInternet balloons crossed oceans and connected paying customers before the business proved impossible to sustain.
Skype
Skype consumer serviceThe service that helped make internet calling ordinary was retired into Microsoft's newer communications platform.
Quibi
It raised US$1.75 billion to reinvent mobile television and disappeared eight months after launch.
Project Ara
Google demonstrated a phone built from replaceable blocks, then stopped before anyone could buy one.
AOL Instant Messenger
AIMFor a generation, the internet sounded like a door opening and closing. Then the buddy list went dark.
Yahoo Answers
Millions of questions survived as search results—until the place where they were asked was switched off.
GeoCities
Before profiles became templates, millions of people built their own bright, awkward corners of the web.
Periscope
The standalone appIt made broadcasting from a phone feel immediate, then dissolved into the platform that bought it.
Humane AI Pin
A screenless AI wearable reached customers, but its essential cloud service lasted less than a year.
Google Wave
Google opened its ambitious email replacement to everyone, but never let the public preview become a stable product.
Mixer
BeamMicrosoft bought a low-latency streaming startup, renamed it Mixer, signed superstar creators—and closed it four years after launch.
Windows Live Messenger
MSN MessengerThe chat client that taught a generation to sign in, nudge and set a status was folded into Skype and finally switched off in China.
Google Reader
Google closed the RSS reader that had quietly become the reading infrastructure for an entire web subculture.
Google Allo
Google launched a messaging app around smart replies and an assistant, then stopped investing after it failed to displace established chat networks.
Google Hangouts for consumers
Google's unified chat layer slowly split into several products until the consumer Hangouts service redirected its last users to Google Chat.
iGoogle
Millions built personalised homepages from clocks, feeds and tiny gadgets; Google decided the app era had made the whole format unnecessary.
Picasa Web Albums
Google moved its photo future into Google Photos and froze the web albums that had stored a decade of family pictures and public galleries.
Google Code Project Hosting
Google hosted open-source code, issues and downloads for a decade, then froze the platform as development communities moved to GitHub.
Google Podcasts
Google built a simple open podcast player, then folded listening into YouTube Music and closed the standalone app.
Google Jamboard
Google sold a collaborative whiteboard and a matching cloud app, then ended both while directing customers to partner tools.
Google Play Music
Google's music locker let users upload their own libraries beside a streaming catalogue, then yielded to YouTube Music.
Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo gave non-programmers a visual canvas for wiring feeds and web data together, then shut it just as no-code tools were becoming a category.
Yahoo Groups
Two decades of mailing lists, fan communities and volunteer archives disappeared from Yahoo's servers after a brief export window.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed aggregated the social web into fast public conversations; Facebook bought the team and eventually turned the service off.
Pebble cloud services
Pebble's watches survived their company's sale only because volunteers rebuilt the cloud services needed to keep them useful.
Essential Products
Android's co-founder launched a premium modular phone company, sold one difficult first device, then closed before its radically narrow successor could ship.
Juicero
A heavily funded connected juicer became a symbol of Silicon Valley excess when reporters squeezed its proprietary packs by hand.
Amazon Glow
Amazon projected games and books onto a table so children could play with remote family, then cancelled the device after barely a year.
Amazon Halo
Amazon's fitness band analysed activity, body composition and even tone of voice, then the entire health platform disappeared with customer refunds.
Amazon Cloud Cam
Amazon sold a home camera whose recordings and core features depended on its cloud, then retired the platform and turned the hardware into e-waste.
Zune Marketplace
Microsoft's music store outlived the Zune players that gave it a name, then shut as subscriptions migrated through Xbox Music and Groove.
Windows Phone Store
Microsoft's mobile app store closed after the operating system had already stopped receiving new features, leaving old phones unable to reinstall software.
Internet Explorer desktop application
The browser that once defined the web was retired inside Windows and progressively redirected into Microsoft Edge.
Adobe Flash Player
A browser plug-in that powered games, animation and video across the web reached end of life and then actively blocked its own content.
Amazon Fire Phone
Amazon built a phone around 3D head tracking and instant shopping recognition, priced it like a flagship, then wrote off unsold inventory.
BlackBerry Messenger for consumers
BBM's PINs and read receipts helped define mobile messaging, but its independent consumer service closed after the network had moved elsewhere.
Nexus Q
Google handed its social streaming sphere to developers and opened preorders, then postponed the consumer launch indefinitely and never shipped the retail product.
Google Glass Enterprise Edition
Google Glass found a second life in factories and clinics after its consumer failure, then Google ended even the enterprise line.
Palm Foleo
Palm announced a Linux laptop companion, demonstrated working hardware and set a price, then cancelled it weeks before release to focus on a future mobile platform.
MobileMe
Apple's paid cloud suite promised effortless sync under the slogan 'Exchange for the rest of us', launched badly, and was replaced by free iCloud.
Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft's multimedia encyclopedia brought maps, audio and video onto home computers, then could not survive a world where a free encyclopedia updated itself continuously.
Inbox by Gmail
Google's experimental email app grouped messages into bundles and treated mail as tasks, then folded selected ideas into Gmail and closed the original experience.
Jaiku
A Finnish microblogging service launched before Twitter, joined Google, became open source and then lost the hosted community it was built to connect.
Meerkat
Meerkat became the breakout app of SXSW by making phone livestreaming effortless, then Twitter cut off its growth channel and launched a rival.
Pownce
Pownce let friends share files, events and messages beyond Twitter's limits, but its acquisition moved the engineers and left the network behind.
Orkut
Google's first major social network became part of everyday internet life in Brazil and India, then gave users three months to preserve a decade of communities.
Rdio
Rdio built one of streaming music's most admired interfaces, but its catalogue and users disappeared into Pandora after bankruptcy.
Path
Path promised a private social network limited to real relationships, grew especially popular in Indonesia, and then erased the small circle it had designed around.
Google Desktop
Google brought web-style search, a sidebar and mini-apps to personal computers, then retired the whole desktop ecosystem as computing moved into browsers and clouds.
Delicious
del.icio.usDelicious taught the web to tag and share bookmarks, survived five owners, and finally became a read-only archive whose social machinery no longer accepted a single link.
Posterous
Posterous made publishing a blog as easy as sending an email, joined Twitter, and one year later told millions of pages to export before the lights went out.
Google Daydream
Google standardised phone-based virtual reality with a soft fabric headset and Android platform, then withdrew hardware and operating-system support as the market moved elsewhere.
Ping
iTunes PingApple launched a social network for music inside iTunes, reached a million sign-ups in two days, and removed it two years later without a standalone archive.
Beats Music
Beats built a streaming service around human curation and sentence-shaped playlists, then Apple bought the company and folded its short life into Apple Music.
Google Answers
Before social question sites and generative AI, Google let people set a price and hire an approved human researcher for an answer—then froze the marketplace as a searchable archive.
Facebook Aquila
Facebook built a solar wing wider than a Boeing 737 to beam the internet from the stratosphere, flew it twice, and closed the aircraft factory before a network existed.
Facebook M
Facebook promised a Messenger assistant that could arrange almost anything, but its apparent intelligence depended on hidden human operators and never escaped a small California test.
CNN+
CNN spent hundreds of millions on a subscription future, launched it days before a corporate merger, and shut it after only weeks when the new owner rejected the strategy.
Windows 10X
Microsoft redesigned Windows for two screens, turned it into a lightweight laptop system when the hardware slipped, and then poured its interface back into Windows 11.
Microsoft Courier
Microsoft built book-like tablet prototypes around ink, clippings and a bottomless journal, then killed the device because it refused to become another Windows PC.
Copland
Apple System 8 projectApple tried to replace almost every foundation of the classic Mac at once, distributed unstable developer builds, and finally bought NeXT when the pieces would not become one operating system.
Firefox OS
Boot to GeckoMozilla tried to make the open web the operating system of low-cost phones, reached markets across the world, and withdrew when apps and hardware economics favoured Android.
AltaVista
AltaVista once searched more of the young web faster than almost anyone, passed through a chain of owners and portals, and ended as a Yahoo redirect.
Yahoo Messenger
Yahoo PagerYahoo Messenger carried status messages, buzzes, webcam calls and decades of friendships, then its owner shut the network without preserving access to old conversations.
Google Cloud Print
Google made old printers accessible from Chromebooks and phones through its cloud, then retired the bridge before every device had an equally simple replacement.
Facebook Paper
Facebook's most elegant mobile app turned the News Feed into a gesture-driven magazine, won design praise and disappeared without ever reaching Android or most countries.
Miiverse
Nintendo built a social network where drawings and handwritten jokes lived inside games themselves, then erased the public communities when the Wii U era ended.
Groove Music Pass
Xbox MusicMicrosoft renamed its streaming subscription from Xbox Music to Groove, integrated it across Windows, and then sent listeners to Spotify while their purchased files stayed behind.
Amazon Dash Buttons
Amazon put branded Wi-Fi ordering buttons beside washing machines and coffee jars, then remotely disabled every physical Dash Button after shopping moved to apps and voice assistants.
Firefox Send
Mozilla built an elegant encrypted file-transfer service, but criminals used its trusted links to distribute malware and the experiment was switched off for everyone.
Mozilla Persona
BrowserIDMozilla tried to let any email address become a private web identity without handing every login to a giant platform, but too few sites adopted it.
Google Buzz
Google dropped a social network directly into Gmail and automatically exposed relationship patterns, turning a product launch into a privacy crisis before closing it.
Google Health
Google invited people to centralise medical records and wellness data, but the service never became part of enough daily health routines to survive.
Google Expeditions
Millions of students took synchronised virtual field trips through cardboard headsets until hybrid classrooms pushed Google to fold the tours into a flatter museum app.
Google Goggles
Before Lens, Google let Android users search by photographing books, landmarks and barcodes; the pioneering app eventually opened only to redirect people elsewhere.
Google Schemer
Google built a social bucket list for finding things to do nearby, but the service lasted barely two years before every scheme and user plan was scheduled for deletion.
Google Toolbar
Google once needed a browser strip to put search, translation and PageRank on every page; modern browsers absorbed the functions and the last Internet Explorer edition quietly vanished.
Formspring / Spring.me
Formspring turned anonymous questions into a viral social profile, escaped a 2013 shutdown at the last minute, then vanished two years later into another social network.
Picnik
Picnik made browser photo editing playful and accessible before Google acquired it, closed the standalone site and moved only pieces of the experience elsewhere.
Knol
Google asked named experts to publish competing authoritative articles and earn advertising revenue, but the answer to Wikipedia never built a durable audience.
MSN TV
WebTVWebTV put email and the web on ordinary television sets before home computers were universal; Microsoft kept the subscription alive long after the idea's peak, then switched it off.
Google Checkout
Google offered shoppers one account for buying across the web, then retired the merchant checkout as its payments strategy shifted toward Wallet and mobile commerce.
Microsoft eBooks Store
Microsoft sold DRM-protected books inside Edge, then closed the store and remotely withdrew every purchased title while refunding readers.
Google Clips
Google trained a tiny camera to decide when family life looked worth recording, sold it for $249 and withdrew it after less than two years.
Windows Live Spaces
Microsoft grew one of the world's largest blogging networks, then moved willing users to WordPress and deleted the Spaces that remained.
iWeb
Apple gave Mac owners a drag-and-drop website builder tied to MobileMe, then stopped development just as iCloud replaced the hosting it was designed around.
Google Video Marketplace
Google sold television and sports downloads protected by its player, then switched off both the store and customers' purchased videos eighteen months later.
Google Labs
Google once put unfinished experiments in one public workshop, then closed the workshop while keeping experimentation scattered across individual products.
Wunderlist
Microsoft bought a beloved cross-platform to-do app, rebuilt its best ideas inside Microsoft To Do and finally switched off Wunderlist syncing.
Sunrise Calendar
Microsoft bought one of the most admired mobile calendars, moved its design and integrations into Outlook and made the original app stop working.
So.cl
Microsoft Research mixed social search, visual collages and group video viewing into a network whose name most people never learned to pronounce.
Amazon Drive
Amazon offered unlimited personal cloud storage, retreated to photos and finally gave customers seventeen months to remove every other file.
Mailbox by Dropbox
Mailbox turned email into a swipeable task list, drew a famous reservation queue and disappeared three years later inside its acquirer's change of focus.
Carousel by Dropbox
Dropbox separated everyone's camera roll into a polished photo timeline, then folded the useful parts back into its main app after less than two years.
Facebook Moments
Facebook used face recognition to find friends in your camera roll, but not enough people used the separate app to keep its private photo groups alive.
Microsoft Band cloud service
The wristbands could still count steps after Microsoft left fitness, but a reset after the cloud shutdown could make a perfectly physical device impossible to set up again.
Cortana as a standalone assistant
Microsoft launched Cortana as Windows Phone's answer to Siri, placed her across Windows and rival phones, then retired the standalone voice assistant for Copilot-era tools.
Facebook Slingshot
Facebook's Snapchat rival made recipients send a photo before they could see yours; the forced reciprocity lasted eighteen months.
Google Latitude
Before constant location sharing became ordinary, Google placed friends on a map and let them check in; four years later it scattered the features into other products.