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Google Social Networks Software

Google Is Killing Its Experimental Social Network Shoelace (engadget.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Google's experimental Area 120 unit launched Shoelace in mid-2019 as a way to help people get together in real life. Unfortunately, the fledgling social network won't make it out of the experimental phase -- the tech giant has announced that Shoelace is shutting down on May 12th. The service was geared towards people looking for group activities with other locals who share the same interests. Say, people interested in photography who want to meet up for a shoot or those looking for buddies to see concerts with. It was only ever available for iOS users in NYC, though, and never quite made its way to other regions.

Based on the team's announcement on its website, the app fell victim to the coronavirus pandemic. Area 120 says it doesn't feel like it's the right time to invest further in the project "given the current health crisis" and that it doesn't have plans to reboot Shoelace in the future. Google will delete all data associated with the service after May 12th, though users can get a copy of it by filling out this form before that date.
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Google Is Killing Its Experimental Social Network Shoelace More

Google Is Killing Its Experimental Social Network Shoelace

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  • it is a google project (Score:4, Informative)

    by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:04PM (#60006004)

    so of course it is closed..

    • so of course it is closed..

      The introductory phrase to so many interesting ideas is "Google is killing..." We're speaking English today because Google was not in charge of the Manhattan Project.

      • Re:it is a google project (Score:4, Informative)

        by careysub ( 976506 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @10:02PM (#60006362)

        I seriously think that this is an adoption barrier to any new Google project at this point. Why would anyone invest their time and effort in using a new Google service when they have a high degree of confidence that the plug will be pulled, often with scant notice, in the not too distant future?

        I have now had to experience of skipping on a new Google offering several times, saying to myself, lets give it a few years and see if it is still there, and seeing it die.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          One thing that perplexes me is the lasting tenacity of Google Apps, when there is Office 365. Seriously, I don't get it! My last three jobs were all-in on Google Apps, but those things are a joke. Google Docs is such shit compared to a real word processor that there actually is no function to insert today's date into a document. Gotta enter it by hand. And if you have a list of words or bullet points, there's no function to alphabetize them. It's like a college project, but entire companies bet their day-to

          • But for some reason, nobody seems to know about them

            I think everybody knows about Microsoft.

            Bottom line is - most people do not need all those features. So why should they pay for them? Seems to me it is actually Microsoft Office that is keeping people in mediocrity. To think that a lot of the world runs on a spreadsheet, Excel or otherwise, it's downright scary. Who knows how many a crappy decision has been made due to a buggy spreadsheet?

          • One thing that perplexes me is the lasting tenacity of Google Apps, when there is Office 365.

            • a) Google's reliablility at keeping medium important services going is not 100%, but for search and Google Apps they are clearly committed.
            • b) Microsoft is committed to keeping things going, but they are also committed to locking user's data in.
            • c) Google doesn't do that. Almost all their services make data export easy.
            • d) Microsoft keeps fucking up the reliability of cloud services

            Taken together, whilst I'd always advise AWS over Google for cloud services just because I don't trust Google to keep things

            • Reliability is nice -after- the service is actually useful.

              Fact is people heavily use spreadsheets and word processing for their required work. Sheets is a fucking toy. When forced to use it, I export to excel, do real work, then reimport to sheets.

              The word processor is almost as bad as sheets but thankfully we never use it for anything.

              Gmail was good 10+ years ago but now it's dated and feels hokey. Yes, I pay for the full ad free business version. It's meh. Outlook is a bear to configure for my taste
              • We have the opposite workflow here. We do our real work in Google Sheets, and cringe when we have to open more than one Excel file at a time - especially with multiple monitors. Now something that makes us different is, we don't build programs in spreadsheets. If you need something resembling that, our developers will add it to our in-house ERP which does everything we need, and nothing we don't need (it is lean and so modular that even I, a nobody, am pushing my own commits now).

                I find a lot of must-have

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by cusco ( 717999 )

                  Not really clear what issues you might have with multiple Excel spreadsheets in multiple monitors. It's not uncommon for me to have half a dozen spreadsheets open at a time in different positions across two or three screens so that I can see a couple of them simultaneously, but then I generally just Alt+Tab through apps rather than trying to fish around with a mouse to find something. If all those spreadsheets were just tabs in browsers I'd be annoyed as hell. I suppose we all have different ways of work

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          I seriously think that this is an adoption barrier to any new Google project at this point. Why would anyone invest their time and effort in using a new Google service when they have a high degree of confidence that the plug will be pulled, often with scant notice, in the not too distant future?

          I hear Google Stadia is looking for customers. They recently got PUBG as a special game which apparently in certain modes can be 2 human players against 98 bots.

          Apparently Stadia is having trouble attracting both pla

          • >Apparently Stadia is having trouble attracting both players and developers, for some odd reason or other.

            Yes strange, as apparently it is such a great value proposition for both..

            Players:
            -Buy again games that you already own
            -Pay a monthly fee
            -Limited number of games
            -Low number of players in multiplayer games
            -Lag
            -No true 4k
            -No clear info on what will happen to purchased games when Google closes the service

            Developers(these are apparently/guess things as lot less is publicly available)
            -Another platform to

        • I wasted three years becoming a Dart expert, so youâ(TM)re right no one should trust them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        The introductory phrase to so many interesting ideas is "Google is killing..." We're speaking English today because Google was not in charge of the Manhattan Project.

        The Manhattan Project certainly involved a lot of killing...

    • Ever notice how people only hear about these projects after they throw it in the trash?

  • Meetup (Score:3)

    by ardmhacha ( 192482 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:07PM (#60006012)

    "The service was geared towards people looking for group activities with other locals who share the same interests."

    Did it do something that meetup doesn't do?

  • Decentralization (Score:3)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:12PM (#60006028)
    The only thing that would really be interesting and shake things up is a decentralized social network not dependent on these tech giants. Everything else is already saturated.

    • . Everything else is already saturated.

      Apparently video chatting wasn't (Zoom). Or regular text chatting (Slack).

      • I'd say those are more conferencing and group chat services. Telegram does a decent job at trying to fill the niche the op mentioned but doesn't seem great at actually connecting people to other new people... and that seems pretty important to me in a social network site. It does broadcast to followers decently, you can setup group chats and that is nice but actually engaging with random people on the service seems strangely lacking.
        • Honestly, these attempts to reinvent the wheel seem ridiculous to me. There are much great social media for different types of communication. I don’t think it’s realistic to come up with something that will be more in demand than Facebook or Twitter. A lot of people work inside these social media and it only strengthens business connections. I can be sure that Facebook is not just a chat room for strangers. In fact, there are many support services for different occasions. I like to use freelance

    • a decentralized social network

      Ya, that might work for a chat based application with very limited Media sharing which is almost completely ephemeral. Most people want to be able to upload a crapload of content and don't want to foot the bill for the storage. And decentralized means the storage is also distributed which means you're not getting any efficiency of scale either. Then comes the question of how to moderate the content, because without some centralized authority to act as a censor it's going to get overrun with nazis and porn.

      • You mean censorship like paid editors to keep nazi posts out like some high quality conversation based message boards have managed to do for many years through a complex system of user based moderation backed by paid censors?

        If only such a thing had a good working real world example to eliminate shit posting and consistently promote quality posts uninfected by personal biases. Haven't seen it yet.

  • with distance compliance to keep people outside of 6 feet away, with an alarm.

    Or only allowing you to meet people wearing masks (hopefully with less robbery)

  • Google SOP (Score:3)

    by sloth jr ( 88200 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:22PM (#60006050)
    Step 1: Offer some service
    Step 2: Kill it

  • Doesn't Google own the phone market with Android OS on phones. Aren't about 90% of the phones Android? I don't even know a person with an iPhone why the hell would Google only make it for iPhone. Of course it failed.

  • open/closed (Score:5, Informative)

    by jemmyw ( 624065 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:24PM (#60006064)
    Google is now shutting down it's projects faster than I even hear about them.

    • Google is now shutting down it's projects faster than I even hear about them.

      It's more efficient that way - no messy data migration to deal with.

  • YAGAINHAUTKI* (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zontar The Mindless ( 9002 ) <{plasticfish.info} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:29PM (#60006084) Homepage

    *Yet Another Google App I Never Heard About Until They Killed It.

  • Remember when Microsoft came out with "Pen for WIndows" to kill Go computing? It delayed the coming of the tablet by about ten years.

    I remember Google Wave. I though it was a great idea, burt the way they rolled it out was dumb and just killed it.

    Now it seems like Google is coming out with these projects which fail ( like "Pen for WIndows" ) just so that someone else doesn't pick them up and create a "google-killer".

    • Google Wave didn't fail. Every single document sharing service that came out for the following 10 years was based on it. That was their whole goal, to own the ecosystem. It was a resounding success for them. Oh you meant failure as in the software sucked? Yeah. Fail.
      • "based on" and "own the ecosystem" is not the same thing.

        Google does not own the whole ecosystem, regardless of how many things were based on it. Unless they get direct royalties from every service "based on" it, they don't own any of them.

  • So smart (Score:3)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Thursday April 30, 2020 @01:09AM (#60006644)
    So many smart people at Google apparently does not understand the concept of "critical mass".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Flat 6 ( 6220052 )

      So many smart people at Google apparently does not understand the concept of "critical mass".

      People living in the Silicon Valley "bubble" sometimes have ideas that just don't translate well to every day normal people. I remember watching a late night comedy skit on Google Glass where the google employee's where wearing these glasses and they were thinking how cool it was that the glasses could identify everyday things like a gas station sign. It was hilarious.

      • Yeah, but even worse, this is the Google bubble. People who are convinced they must be the best of the best because they got into Google.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by rho ( 6063 )

          That may have been true when Google was relatively small. Now they just need warm bodies to do average computer-janitor things, but each one of them is convinced it's 2004 and they're tech titans/geniuses.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Sounds like Cisco a decade ago. They decided to get into the physical security field and put out their own VMS (Video Management System). Essentially they had a bunch of marketers and network engineers get together and say, "If we do it this way we'll sell a shitload of hardware and since we're Cisco everyone will buy it!" By all the gods, it was the worst thing the industry ever saw, security holes you could drive a truck through (anonymous telnet would log you in as root with no password), would only r

  • I was a fairly active Google Plus member for some time up until they killed it off. One thing I noticed - and heard many people mention - was that a lot of photographers preferred Google Plus over other social media platforms. Photographers often used it not just to show some of their work and to mention their upcoming shows, they also used it to arrange for walking photo tours of whatever city they happened to be in. It doesn't surprise me that they would have attracted a fair number of NYC based photographers with a new social media app based on that.

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