1.Google Lively
Users created avatars to interact in a three-dimensional environment that combined recognizable chat dynamics with "Minecraft"-style architecture and creation of spaces. While the experience itself was reportedly frustrating due to server glitches and lags, the idea was fairly solid. Chat rooms have been around since the beginning of the Internet, as a way to communicate with real-life friends as well as meeting and connecting with strangers, and vogues in their use tend to shift pretty often: Chat Roulette was trendy for a second, for example, while recent advances in webcam and video-chat have only begun moving real time video interaction into the realm of the video-phones we were always promised.
Which could be the problem. Chat-rooms and bulletin boards, once the standard for online friendliness, have given way to the social Web. When we meet strangers now, it's often through established connections:Facebook, Twitter and similar online social giants all operate on the idea of shared experiences we've already had. While in the dawn of the Internet, real-life analogues to night clubs or coffee shops such as Lively, made sense, we've moved past the idea that the Internet is a "place" that you "visit," obviating the need for such measures. Now, the Internet lies atop the world we already live in, so mixing things up with people we don't know is no longer the goal: It's a feature. A consequence of living in the world, rather than part of our escape from it.
2.Google Answers
Another thing we don't do anymore, now that Google is freely available and instantly useful, is the "answers" concept. While Yahoo! Answers, for example, is still used, it's usually because it's entertaining and weird, not because you expect any real answers. When you want actual information, you go to Web sites established to discuss your specific area of interest. You use social networking to ask the people you know and trust. Once again, we see an obsolete model -- a universal tip line, answering any question you might have -- to a version more closely mirroring our actual, real-world experience.
But what was it? Several companies – such as ChaCha and AskJeeves -- were built along the lines described above: Ask a question, about anything, and get an answer back. It's a way of getting other people to Google things for you (which to my mind sounds insane). Where these concepts, and Google Answers, go wrong is in monetizing the concept. Asking somebody to Google something for you is bad netiquette, certainly -- but it's also stupid business. To make things worse, Answers used an auction-house model, paying whichever freelancer could be bothered at the given price to provide the answer.
Silly now, when your browser will automatically give you search results and Google's powerful engines make ever better attempts at giving you the correct ones, but in the transitional time before Google became second nature to all of us -- from April 2002 to November 2006, to be specific -- it served a purpose
3.Google Print Ads and Google Radio Ads
Picking up on that pesky "monetize the Internet" theme, we have Google's forays into non-Internet advertising. Perhaps influenced by ongoing pressure to show revenue, Google attempted to expand its brand into the print and radio advertising industries. With its astounding user-information and product-purchase metrics, Google could do for offline concerns what they did (and continue to do) for online advertisers: Bring potential customer information to the people that need it.
Of course, Google's private and personal consumer information is its bread and butter and probably will be for the foreseeable future. In a world where all the information ever created by humans is quickly becoming instantly available, advertising continues to be the dominant profit paradigm.
While using Google metrics to target consumers in offline markets – which is exactly what happened -- may sound like a good deal for offline advertisers, those methods of communicating with consumers are dying. The metrics Google uses to perfectly identify the right market for ad placements online just didn't translate to the offline world. Tracking the success of Google's ad placements proved difficult, and both radio and print executives were reluctant to turn over their advertising systems to Google's methods.
4.Dodgeball
In 2005, two Google acquisitions in particular stick out: Android, and Dodgeball. Android, of course, has no place being discussed in this article. But Dodgeball is more interesting, as the first case on our list of Google acquiring and developing an idea that eventually succeeded elsewhere, becoming the current standard.
Dodgeball was a location-specific social networking site and was acquired, along with cofounder Dennis Crowley, in May 2005 [source: Seigler]. Again, we see the forward-thinking merge between online and real-world life, as applications like this use smartphone technology to connect us, tout our social experiences and favorite locations, and send out all manner of food portraiture to everyone we know. Perfect Google situation, right?
So what happened? Well, nothing. For two years, that is, until Crowley left Google in frustration and founded Foursquare. The blame here rests in the fact that the idea was too prescient, that the hardware took too long to catch up to the idea, but catch up it did. Now, of course, Google's got Latitude, and Facebook's Places may take the Foursquare crown as the check-in app of choice.
Of course, neither of those latter apps have what made Foursquare such a hit -- the gamification aspect, in which demonstrated loyalty to a given business or location results in various badges and bells -- but if we follow our "real world parallel" model, it seems those extra features won't really matter as much moving forward.
Users check in now because that's just what you do. It's not to get a virtual treat; checking in is faster and easier than tweeting or Facebooking our location to our friends. And with location mapping becoming a standard part of photo apps like Instagram, the concept of the check-in itself has morphed itself into closer approximation of what the connected life has become: The augmentation, rather than the replacement, of reality.
5.Jaiku
Google acquired microblogging site Jaiku in October 2007, but by January 2009, it was clear that Twitter was the official winner in the short post race [source: Kincaid]. A social network is only as powerful as the users themselves, and Twitter was already well on its way by the time of this acquisition.
The divorce between Google and Jaiku is surrounded by rumors of internal bad blood, but either way, this Finnish import -- so-named because the microblogging aspect makes its messages look like haiku -- was open-source after 2009. In 2011, Google announced that it was shutting down Jaiku for good, effective Jan. 15, 2012 [source: Horowitz]. Perhaps in the same way that the MySpace graveyard has over the years become a home-base headquarters for smaller unknown bands -- a development presaged by MySpace's music-integration technology, which still sets it apart from most social networks that aren't actively concerned with music -- it could have become something new. Now, we'll never know.
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