Officially Gone
It once belonged to the world. Now it has left.
231 verified storiesGoogle Stadia
Google sold cloud gaming to the world, then closed the entire doorway three years later.
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.
Nakagin Capsule Tower
A building designed for replaceable capsules waited for renewal—and received demolition instead.
Crucible
It launched, retreated into closed beta, and shut down—all within the same year.
London After Midnight
It reached cinemas worldwide. The last known print later vanished in a vault fire.
Cleopatra
The 1917 lost filmIt was once an expensive screen spectacle. Today, only fragments and photographs remain.
Original Pennsylvania Station
It let travellers enter New York like gods. Then the building above the tracks was demolished.
Vine
Six-second loops shaped an internet language. Then uploads—and later much of the archive—disappeared.
Concord
Sony launched a first-party multiplayer game worldwide, then took it offline two weeks later.
Babylon's Fall
A full-price online game launched, stopped selling six months later and became unplayable before its first anniversary.
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.
The Crystal Palace
The building that made glass and iron feel limitless burned so brightly that its end was visible across London.
Kowloon Walled City
A military outpost became an intensely inhabited urban block, then was cleared until only a gate and a yamen remained.
Euston Arch
London's first great railway gateway was dismantled, then much of its stone was rediscovered inside an East London waterway.
Robin Hood Gardens
The estate's streets in the sky were denied protection, demolished, and preserved as a three-storey museum fragment.
Quibi
It raised US$1.75 billion to reinvent mobile television and disappeared eight months after launch.
OnLive
Years before cloud gaming became routine, OnLive streamed full games to thin clients—and sold its remains to Sony.
The Mountain Eagle
Alfred Hitchcock's second feature was released, reviewed and then disappeared without a known surviving print.
Convention City
A hit pre-Code comedy became too indecent to reissue, then its studio negative was marked for destruction.
The Patriot
The lost 1928 filmIt earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, yet most of the film no longer exists.
The Way of All Flesh
The lost 1927 filmThe first Best Actor Oscar honored a performance that can now be seen only in fragments.
Imperial Hotel
Frank Lloyd Wright's Tokyo buildingWright's hotel survived Tokyo's great earthquake, then lost the slower contest against age, subsidence and redevelopment.
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.
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.
LawBreakers
A polished gravity-defying shooter reached full release, then lost both its studio and its servers thirteen months later.
Battleborn
Battleborn contained a full campaign, but its always-online design erased even single-player access when the servers closed.
Pruitt–Igoe
Thirty-three public-housing towers were demolished, then reduced to a design parable that obscured the policies and people that shaped their fate.
Singer Building
The world's tallest building became the tallest tower ever deliberately demolished after New York decided it could not save it.
The Divine Woman
Greta Garbo's released film survives as a single tantalising reel while the rest of its performance is gone.
The Great Gatsby (1926)
The first Great Gatsby film reached cinemas one year after the novel, but today only its trailer still moves.
The Rogue Song
An Oscar-nominated early colour musical survives in scattered fragments but not as the feature audiences saw.
The Cat Creeps
Universal's first major sound-horror mystery vanished while its Spanish-language companion survived.
4 Devils
Murnau's follow-up to Sunrise was released in two versions; neither is now known to survive complete.
The Werewolf (1913)
Cinema's earliest documented werewolf transformation was released, then reportedly burned with other Universal negatives.
Saved from the Titanic
A Titanic survivor reenacted her own escape for the camera, but the resulting film disappeared in a studio fire.
The Life of General Villa
Pancho Villa signed with a film company to help stage his own screen legend; most of the released feature is gone.
The Battle Cry of Peace
One of silent cinema's most aggressive calls for military preparedness survives only in incomplete form.
The Great Love
Griffith filmed wartime Britain with real public figures, but the released feature no longer survives complete.
The Miracle Man
The film that helped turn Lon Chaney into a star became a box-office success, then shrank to fragments.
A Blind Bargain
Lon Chaney played both scientist and ape-like experiment in a horror feature whose known print was later destroyed.
Humor Risk
The Marx Brothers made one silent film before their classics; no one can now screen it to see what they tried.
Hollywood (1923)
A silent tour through 1920s Hollywood gathered an extraordinary cast of cameos, then vanished almost completely.
The City Gone Wild
Louise Brooks appeared in this released underworld drama, but no complete copy remains to restore the performance.
Larkin Administration Building
Frank Lloyd Wright designed a luminous, air-conditioned cathedral of office work, but Buffalo demolished it for a truck stop that was never built.
Sutro Baths
San Francisco's vast glass-roofed swimming complex survived decline and conversion attempts, then burned as demolition was already under way.
New York Crystal Palace
New York built its own iron-and-glass exhibition palace, watched it struggle financially, then saw it burn in less than fifteen minutes.
Savoy-Plaza Hotel
A fashionable Fifth Avenue hotel was demolished after only 38 years to make room for the General Motors Building.
New York World Building
Pulitzer's domed newspaper tower once claimed the world's height record, then disappeared for a widened approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Garrick Theater
Chicago demolished one of Adler and Sullivan's richest theatres after preservationists failed to overcome the economics of its site.
Prentice Women's Hospital
Bertrand Goldberg's four-lobed concrete hospital lost a national preservation campaign and was demolished for a medical research site.
Madison Square Garden II
Stanford White's towered arena gave New York sports, spectacle and scandal, then vanished after its owners decided the land was worth more than the building.
Fox Theatre San Francisco
San Francisco's enormous movie palace closed after three decades and was demolished weeks after a final farewell show.
Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel
Atlantic City's largest resort hotel, famous for its reinforced-concrete wing, was demolished as casino redevelopment remade the Boardwalk.
Chicago Federal Building
A domed federal complex occupying an entire Chicago block was demolished for Mies van der Rohe's new civic plaza.
Chicago Stock Exchange Building
Chicago demolished Adler and Sullivan's exchange tower but reconstructed its trading room inside a museum.
Original Waldorf–Astoria
New York's defining luxury hotel closed at the height of its fame because its Fifth Avenue land was chosen for the Empire State Building.
Old Metropolitan Opera House
New York's original Metropolitan Opera House survived fire and repeated alteration, then was demolished after the company moved to Lincoln Center.
Palace of the Republic
East Germany's parliament and public culture palace closed over asbestos, reopened briefly as an art shell, then was dismantled for a reconstructed royal palace.
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.
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.
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.
Darkspore
EA sold a creature-building action RPG that required its servers even for solo play, then made every legitimate copy unusable when those servers closed.
The Culling 2
Xaviant formally launched a battle royale, found almost nobody playing, and withdrew it with refunds only eight days later.
Infinite Crisis
Turbine moved its DC Comics MOBA from years of testing to formal launch, then announced closure only two months later.
WildStar
Carbine's colourful science-fiction MMO launched with subscription ambitions, went free-to-play, and vanished when NCSoft closed both world and studio.
Landmark
The building tool created to help shape EverQuest Next outlived that cancelled MMO, reached formal release, and then survived only eight more months.
Project Spark
Microsoft formally launched a game-making world, made all its content free, and then switched off the servers that held its community creations.
Hyper Scape
Ubisoft launched a fast vertical battle royale with livestream voting, but Neo Arcadia emptied in less than two years.
Rumbleverse
Iron Galaxy's wrestling battle royale launched across major platforms and received only two seasons before Epic ended it after six months.
Club Penguin
A generation decorated igloos and met friends as cartoon penguins until Disney closed the original web world for a mobile successor.
Marvel Heroes
Gazillion combined Diablo-style combat with a huge Marvel roster, then its licence and studio collapsed so quickly that the final shutdown arrived early.
Orcs Must Die! Unchained
Robot Entertainment formally released a free online reinvention of its trap-defence series, then removed the servers that made every mode work.
Spellbreak
Proletariat formally launched a battle royale built around elemental spell combinations, then closed the Hollow Lands after two years.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — First Assault Online
Nexon formally released a licensed cyberpunk shooter, rebuilt it during service, and closed every version less than two years later.
Gigantic (2017 game)
GiganticMotiga's colourful action game formally launched after a difficult development, then its giant guardians fell silent only a year later.
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.
Garden Palace
Sydney built an exhibition palace larger than St Mary's Cathedral in eight months; three years later a dawn fire erased the building, a census and irreplaceable collections together.
Melbourne Fish Market
Flinders Street Fish MarketAn ornate refrigerated market greeted trains at Flinders and Spencer Streets for nearly seventy years, then road-building removed its towers and riverfront arcades.
APA Building
Australian BuildingAustralia's first true skyscraper rose above Melbourne in brick, turrets and lifts, lost its crown in the 1950s, and was demolished despite heritage recognition.
Federal Coffee Palace
Melbourne's largest hotel opened without a drop of alcohol beneath a domed tower; after temperance faded, developers demolished the entire palace for offices.
Bellevue Hotel
Brisbane's politicians argued for years over the Bellevue Hotel; then contractors arrived under police protection at midnight and settled the heritage dispute before sunrise.
Anthony Hordern's Palace Emporium
Sydney's universal provider filled an entire city block and promised everything from a needle to an anchor; after the store closed, the palace became a famous hole in the ground.
Melbourne's First Exhibition Building
William Street Exhibition BuildingMelbourne assembled a glass-roofed exhibition hall before it had a grand library, then watched the temporary landmark leak, decay and disappear into the Royal Mint site.
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.
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.
Echo VR
Ready at Dawn built one of virtual reality's most convincing team sports, then Meta switched off every server and left its zero-gravity arenas unreachable.
CrossfireX
Smilegate brought Crossfire to Xbox with Remedy-made campaigns, then shut down the entire package after fifteen months—including the paid single-player stories.
Gundam Evolution
Bandai Namco turned mobile suits from across Gundam history into a free six-versus-six shooter, then ended the war just fourteen months after launch.
Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier
Square Enix placed a mobile battle royale thirty years before Final Fantasy VII, but Midgar's soldier candidates disappeared after barely fourteen months.
Apex Legends Mobile
EA rebuilt Apex Legends for phones, gave it exclusive legends and a global launch, then cancelled the mobile branch before its first anniversary.
The Cycle: Frontier
Yager rebuilt The Cycle as a tense extraction shooter where every alien storm threatened a player's haul, but cheating, churn and finances ended Fortuna III.
Knockout City
Velan turned dodgeball into a bright competitive city sport, bought back its publishing rights and went free-to-play, but still could not keep the live service sustainable.
Dragalia Lost
Nintendo's first new mobile world grew through four years of dragons, music and raids, then closed so completely that its long campaign became inaccessible.
Baltard Pavilions of Les Halles
Paris fed itself beneath twelve iron-and-glass pavilions that Victor Baltard made famous; modern wholesale logistics displaced the market and demolition spared only one hall.
Sutyagin House
A Russian entrepreneur kept adding timber storeys until his home looked like a thirteen-level wooden skyscraper; courts cut it down and fire erased the remainder.
Xanadu House of the Future
Kissimmee Xanadu HouseA foam-domed Florida attraction promised computerised kitchens and electronic walls before home computing was ordinary, then mould and abandonment turned the future into rubble.
Hotel Okura Tokyo Main Wing
Japan's modernist showcase welcomed presidents beneath orchid lights and geometric screens; redevelopment replaced the beloved low-rise wing with a taller luxury hotel.
Hall of Nations
India celebrated twenty-five years of independence beneath a vast concrete space frame, then demolished the modernist landmark while its heritage case was still being argued.
Welbeck Street Car Park
A London car park turned prefabricated concrete diamonds into a sculptural façade, but listing refusals left the Brutalist landmark vulnerable to a hotel redevelopment.
Perth Entertainment Centre
Perth's concrete indoor arena hosted Queen, basketball and generations of concerts, then stood empty for nine years before demolition erased its giant shadow from Wellington Street.
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.
Dr. Mario World
Nintendo turned its pill-matching series into a cheerful mobile service, then made every stage inaccessible just over two years after launch.
Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia
A turn-based Final Fantasy crossover assembled nearly every era of the series, then its 170-plus heroes and years of story vanished behind an end-of-service screen.
Mobius Final Fantasy
Square Enix sold Mobius as a console-scale Final Fantasy for phones and PC, completed its second story arc, then erased the entire playable world.
Pokémon Duel
Pokémon ComasterPokémon pieces crossed a tactical board through spins, decks and live events until The Pokémon Company retired the servers and every collection disappeared with them.
Kingdom Hearts Union χ
Kingdom Hearts Unchained χA phone game carried foundational Kingdom Hearts history for six years, then replaced its playable world with a stripped-down theatre before that app also disappeared.
Star Ocean: Anamnesis
Tri-Ace compressed Star Ocean's real-time combat into a mobile crossover, but its global branch closed early and Japan's last servers followed in 2021.
NieR Re[in]carnation
Yoko Taro's mobile chapter led players through the Cage, finished its final act, and then removed the only interactive route into a story treated as part of NieR canon.
Miitomo
Nintendo's first smartphone app turned friends' answers into Mii conversations and surreal photos, then deleted the social space worldwide after two years.
Salomé (1918) — Complete Film
Theda Bara's lavish biblical spectacle once ran for more than an hour; a rediscovered two-minute fragment is all that can now move on screen.
A Daughter of the Gods
Hollywood's first million-dollar spectacle filled Jamaican locations with mermaids, armies and Annette Kellerman, yet no known moving print survives.
The Gulf Between
The first feature photographed in Technicolor proved a colour process could carry a full story, but only a handful of frames remain from the experiment.
Hats Off
Laurel and Hardy carried a washing machine up a vast staircase in the film that inspired The Music Box, but their earlier climb has vanished completely.
The Queen of Sheba (1921) — Complete Film
Fox built an immense biblical romance around Betty Blythe's spectacular costumes; today seventeen seconds stand in for more than nine reels.
The Terror
Warner Bros.' first all-talking horror feature sent voices through Vitaphone discs; the soundtrack survives, but the images it was meant to haunt are gone.
The Story of the Kelly Gang — Complete Cut
Australia created the world's first feature-length narrative film; roughly an hour was once screened, but only fragments can be assembled today.
Old Wembley Stadium
Wembley's twin towers framed English football, Olympic races and concerts for nearly eighty years before the entire national landmark made way for a new arena.
Birmingham Central Library
John Madin's inverted concrete ziggurat became both Birmingham's civic icon and its most argued-over building, then redevelopment reduced it to aggregate.
Tricorn Centre
Portsmouth's concrete shopping fortress was praised as muscular urban sculpture and reviled as a civic eyesore before excavators ended the argument.
Trinity Square Car Park
A rooftop restaurant hung above Gateshead's concrete car park like a glass control room; Get Carter made it cinematic, but neglect made it disposable.
Pan-Pacific Auditorium
Four Streamline Moderne pylons advertised Los Angeles modernity long after the arena behind them closed; fire finally consumed the abandoned landmark.
Richfield Tower
Los Angeles built an oil-company cathedral in black and gold, crowned it with winged figures, and demolished it just forty years later for a glass corporate plaza.
New York Hippodrome
The world's largest theatre could stage cavalry, elephants and aquatic spectacles before changing entertainment economics emptied its six-thousand-seat interior.
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.
Hot News
Bebe Daniels chased newsreel scoops across Paramount's silent comedy, but the feature now survives only through records, reviews and publicity images.
Hotel Pennsylvania
McKim, Mead & White built a two-thousand-room hotel opposite Penn Station; after years of preservation fights, Manhattan demolished the century-old giant for an office tower.
5Pointz
A Queens factory became an internationally curated graffiti landmark, only for its owner to whitewash the art overnight and demolish the walls beneath luxury towers.
Madison Square Garden I
The first building called Madison Square Garden converted a railroad depot into an open-air arena, survived only eleven years and gave its name to three successors elsewhere.
Central Park Casino
A modest park refreshment house evolved into New York's glamorous Jazz Age nightclub until Robert Moses denounced its exclusivity and tore it down.
Bonwit Teller Building
Art Deco limestone reliefs adorned Fifth Avenue until Donald Trump promised them to a museum, declared removal too costly and had them smashed during demolition.
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.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
Niantic turned the wizarding world into a location game, then ended the Calamity and switched off every spell after two and a half years.
Pokémon Rumble Rush
A toy Pokémon expedition crossed island after island for fourteen months, then became impossible to install, update or play.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Cross Duel
Konami put four duelists on one connected board, but the mobile experiment folded one day short of its first global anniversary.
Tales of Luminaria
Twenty-one promised protagonists entered a war told in weekly episodes, but the servers closed before every character received a finished story.
Tales of Crestoria
A darker Tales world built around public condemnation reached millions of downloads, yet its original story vanished without a playable offline edition.
Echoes of Mana
Square Enix gathered three decades of Mana heroes into one mobile world, then shut it down only 383 days after launch.
Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights
A tenth-anniversary Bravely crossover reached Japan, closed thirteen months later and survived only as a stripped-down offline viewer.
Love Live! School Idol Festival
Millions tapped through a decade of school-idol songs, then the original global rhythm game graduated and took most of its collected cards with it.
The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin
One of 1918's great American propaganda hits once turned Kaiser Wilhelm II into a screen villain; today not one complete reel is known to survive.
The Tower of Lies
Victor Sjöström directed Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer in a Swedish tragedy that audiences could once see, but no known print can now replay it.
The Great Moment
Gloria Swanson's first Paramount starring vehicle survives only in a fragment, leaving most of its globe-crossing melodrama outside the screen.
The Eternal City
An American crew filmed Rome, the Vatican and thousands of soldiers on an unprecedented scale, but the first screen version of The Eternal City has disappeared.
Flaming Youth — the complete film
The film that fixed Colleen Moore's flapper image became a cultural shorthand for the 1920s; nearly all nine reels are now gone.
The Ancient Mariner
Fox combined Coleridge's supernatural voyage with a modern Clara Bow melodrama, then all six reels slipped out of known film collections.
The American Venus
Paramount staged beauty contests and early Technicolor spectacle around Miss America; only seconds of Louise Brooks now move on film.
Hotel Australia, Sydney
Sydney's grand wartime hotel welcomed celebrities and servicemen for eight decades, then vanished with Rowe Street beneath the MLC Centre.
New Tivoli Theatre, Sydney
The theatre that carried Sydney vaudeville through depression, war and television closed after its last revue; promised replacement stages never appeared.
Regent Theatre, Sydney
A George Street picture palace survived cinema, opera and live music, but not the demolition crews that arrived after years of heritage campaigns.
Paris Theatre, Sydney
Walter Burley Griffin's modest picture palace kept reinventing itself as cinema, revue and radical theatre until apartments replaced its final stage.
Intercolonial Exhibition Building, Sydney
Australia's first major intercolonial exhibition hall stood in Prince Alfred Park for 84 years, appeared in some of the country's earliest film and then made way for a swimming pool.
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.
The News Parade
Fox sent a fictional newsreel cameraman from New York to Palm Beach and Havana, released the globe-trotting comedy and then lost every known print.
Prince Edward Theatre, Sydney
Sydney's Theatre Beautiful opened with marble staircases, fountains and a crystal chandelier; forty-one years later television cameras recorded its farewell before demolition began.