Google's Hyperlocal News App 'Bulletin' Is Shutting Down (androidpolice.com) 18
Google's hyperlocal news service called Bulletin is shutting down in November. Android Police reports: The idea behind bulletin was that users could post news from their neighborhood, allowing others in the same area to hear stories that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle. The service also relied on AMP to load pages quickly. Google started with just a few cities, but Bulletin later expanded to all of the U.S. and Canada. Bulletin never gained traction, probably because Google failed to promote it in any way, and now it's shutting down.
Google says Bulletin will close for good on November 22nd, at which time it will delete all remaining Bulletin content. If you used Bulletin and would like to save your stories, Google has added an export option. Google suggests Bulletin users can start posting on the Blogger platform, but that naturally lacks all the location-aware features of Bulletin.
Google says Bulletin will close for good on November 22nd, at which time it will delete all remaining Bulletin content. If you used Bulletin and would like to save your stories, Google has added an export option. Google suggests Bulletin users can start posting on the Blogger platform, but that naturally lacks all the location-aware features of Bulletin.
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Yup. This about par for the course when it comes to Google. This is why I am reluctant to use Google services in ANYTHING critical (with the exception of GMAIL).
Let's hope they don't decide to just shut down their mail service.
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Which is often part of the problem with Googles services. They often are release with big fanfare... Then crickets. For an advertising company, they are not really good at promoting their services. Especially their new ones. Not all products are going to be a Hit, like Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and Android.
Even Android took Google a lot of resources to market it to phone manufactures, as the iPhone replacement OS. But for most of their products their marketing is make it live, tell
Never heard of it before (Score:4, Insightful)
probably because Google failed to promote it in any way, and now it's shutting down
Never even heard of it before today. They set it up to fail. I wonder why they did that.
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I never even saw Bulletin on Google Play, and I remember going through all the Google apps to see what they had. Was it only visible to certain users?
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bulletin who? (Score:2)
users could post news from their neighborhood, allowing others in the same area to hear stories that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle
well, *that* got lost in the shuffle [inside google...]
Of course it failed (Score:2)
They're darned right it wasn't promoted in any way. I'm only hearing about it now when they're shutting it down.
Weird for a service that was essentially supposed to rely on network effects.
Sam
Tomb of the unknown apps (Score:2)
How can Google be this spectacularly bad at advertising? Aren't they supposed to be an advertising company? Are they competent at anything but search? It doesn't really look like it. I don't even think Android is particularly good. iOS is probably technically superior, though i won't run it on both ideological and financial bases. Can they do anything right?
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"I don't even think Android is particularly good. iOS is probably technically superior"
When iOS can have more than 2 apps on screen at the same time get back to us. It might not matter on a phone but its a big deal on a large tablet. Android has a proper old school overlapping bordered windowing system built in now which can come in very handy.
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There are no big technical hurdles to doing that, Apple has simply chosen not to. And so few handheld devices have enough RAM to gracefully run multiple apps at once that the feature is all but unused. And I don't want to use Android as a desktop OS because of the senseless overhead, I want native apps. So really, multiwindow is irrelevant to me.
I'm not going to use iOS regardless, though, because of the walled garden. Even if iOS were clearly technically superior to Android, Apple could cram it up their ap
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"Apple has simply chosen not to"
And therefor iOS is technically inferior.
"And so few handheld devices have enough RAM to gracefully run multiple apps at once"
BS. I've never had an issue and most tablets today are on par with low end laptops wrt to power and memory.
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The RAM issue might have been a problem before, but there are multiple phones with 12 GB RAM on the market right now, and by all accounts, that's way overkill and actual usage maxes out somewhere around half of that, leaving a huge amount of headroom.
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They exist, they're just not common. Most phones are still around 2-4GB. It's coming to the masses, but it's not here yet. Give it another generation or so and enough people will have it to where it's going to actually be important. It's nice that Google is finally offering a desktop mode, and I sure hope they actually drop the new Android sometime soon. The lack of recent news makes me hopeful that it will happen sooner rather than later; I figure they'd be doing another beta release otherwise.
could of been loaded with fake news from ADT (Score:2)
could of been loaded with fake news from ADT
Re: could of been loaded with fake news from ADT (Score:2)
Please observe a moment of silence (Score:2)
Please observe a moment of silence, as another app is killed by Google [killedbygoogle.com], and joins its brethren in the Google Graveyard [gcemetery.co].