The Google Cemetery - A list of dead Google projects and why they were shut down

Google has become a bit infamous for killing off their projects. Especially the shutdown of Google Reader hit Google's brand hard in my opinion. It didn't have mainstream appeal when it was shut down, but the people who did use and swear by it where especially journalists and technically minded people like developers, the kind of people who can make a lot of noise in the right places when they're angry :) But for Google, it's not enough to have hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of millions of users. Either a project is at the very top, or it's going to be killed off by Google it seems. Understandable, business is business, but unfortunate.

That's why whenever Google announces something new, no matter if it's consumer centric or targeting developers and businesses, the forums and comment section are littered with comments saying something along the line of "Why should I use this, Google is going to kill it off in a year anyhow".

But what projects has Google killed off exactly? Do you know them all? Today, a website called The Google Cemetary was posted to Hacker News which shows a nice list of all the consumer facing Google projects that were killed off, and Google's statement on why it was done can be seen when you hover with your mouse cursor over any of the projects.

As commenters on Hacker News pointed out, the list is far from complete, and one user posted his own alternative list of killed off Google projects which has a lot more projects listed (but also some mobile phone models which shouldn't really be on the list).

Still, it's a very nice resource to see a bit of computing history and remember some of the really cool projects from Google like Wave, which sadly just didn't work out.