I’ve literally never heard of Keen until this article.
No surprise. Nobody talks about new Google projects any more, since the assumption is they’ll be gone in a year.
Edit: Not even hyperbole. This very article states Keen was launched in 2020 and stopped receiving updates in 2021. They shelved it in literally a year.
At least they didnt intigrate it with Gmail or some other insane bloat they like to do.
I’d have appreciated them integrating Google reader with Gmail instead of killing it off
My ass is still a little chapped from Google Plus integration with Youtube.
My understanding is that Google “rates” its leaders by the number and types of projects they develop. Ergo there are a lot of people working on disparate items that often overlap, because it’s “their” project. Once the project completes, they get their credit, stop caring, and move on to the next. It is said this is why google creates then kills so much. It’s by design, essentially. The products they keep are the ones that make the most ad revenue.
Yup. Even if Google came out with a really cool service tomorrow that I found far better than alternatives, I still wouldn’t use it, because unless I’m very lucky, it’ll be axed at some point. And Google has only themselves to blame.
I’ll happily shout from the rooftops about my dislike of Apple (their philosophy, faux environmentalism, price-gouging, anti-competitive, anti-repair BS, I could go on for a while), but when was the last time they did this? The fucking Newton? Sure the iPod was axed, but I think it’s fairer to say the market axed MP3 players, rather than Apple axed the iPod.
If Apple announces something, you can be almost certain it’ll still be around in a decade.
Look at Apple Maps. It was an absolute joke when it came out and people mocked and memed it relentlessly.
If Google were in that position, they’d have just scrapped it and moved on to their next project that’d probably be scrapped too.
Fuck Google’s dumb businesses practices, and fuck them for making me say something to Apple’s credit. Makes me feel dirty.
Throwing together a service, telling no one, then promptly cancelling it (often because no one used it) is truly the Googlest thing.
So experimental I didn’t even know Google had a Pinterest-like social media platform.
Literally never heard of it, which is probably the reason and kinda makes it a good call?
It’s just self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. No one trust Google to keep anything around for more than a couple years so they don’t use it. Then it gets scrapped as a failure and everyone is proven correct.
In this case, probably. I don’t think the world was asking for a Pinterest clone.
But the problem is, Google does this with everything.
Stadia had an incredibly successful moment with the Cyberpunk launch. Yet Google failed to hype it up, and then announced about two months later that they were laying off a bunch of devs.
At the same time, they restructured the monetization and improved the client, making it a really compelling service. And all the news was “Stadia is dead”. And then it was.
An unrelated thing killed by Google that just makes me giggle.
So they upgraded phones once and then said, “fuck that.”
Lol
