The Internet Graveyard

Google Stadia

Lived 4 years

“Cloud gaming service that never got the AAA exclusives or trust it needed. Refunded all hardware and software purchases.”

Internet Explorer

Lived 27 years

“The browser that won the first browser war and then lost everything else. Replaced by Edge.”

Adobe Flash Player

Lived 24 years

“The plugin that powered an entire era of web games and animation. Killed by HTML5 and a decade of security holes.”

Mixer

Lived 4 years

“Microsoft's Twitch competitor. Signed Ninja and Shroud for tens of millions, then folded into Facebook Gaming.”

Quibi

Lived 0 years

“Short-form mobile-only streaming. Raised $1.75 billion, launched into the pandemic, dead in six months.”

BlackBerry Messenger (BBM)

Lived 14 years

“The consumer messenger that defined BlackBerry. Iconic D and R receipts. Killed by WhatsApp.”

Google Allo

Lived 3 years

“Google's WhatsApp competitor with built-in Assistant. Killed after Google pivoted (again) to RCS Messages.”

Google+

Lived 8 years

“Google's attempt at Facebook. Killed after a data leak and an admission that 90% of sessions lasted under 5 seconds.”

HipChat

Lived 10 years

“Atlassian's team chat. Lost the war to Slack so badly that Atlassian sold the IP to Slack on the way out.”

Inbox by Gmail

Lived 5 years

“Google's reimagined email app. Snoozes, bundles, smart reply. Killed after the ideas got backported to Gmail.”

Klout

Lived 10 years

“Assigned everyone a "social influence score" out of 100. Became a punchline; died the day GDPR took effect.”

Path

Lived 8 years

“Private social network capped at 50 friends. Beautiful design, never found product-market fit.”

Storify

Lived 8 years

“Turned tweets and social posts into curated stories. Journalists relied on it. Adobe killed it after acquiring Livefyre.”

Yahoo! Messenger

Lived 20 years

“IM client that introduced free PC-to-phone calls. Outlasted its parent company's relevance.”

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger)

Lived 20 years

“The original instant messenger. "BRB" and away messages defined a generation's online identity.”

Vine

Lived 5 years

“Six-second looping videos that defined an era of internet humor. Twitter shut it down before figuring out monetization.”

Yik Yak

Lived 4 years

“Anonymous geo-fenced posting that took over US college campuses. Killed by harassment problems. (Revived briefly in 2021.)”

Google Code

Lived 10 years

“Open-source project hosting before GitHub took over. Site shut down; archive remains.”

Mailbox

Lived 3 years

“Swipe-to-archive email that defined modern inbox interactions. Dropbox bought it and quietly killed it.”

Picasa

Lived 14 years

“Photo organiser Google acquired in 2004. Replaced by Google Photos, which never quite filled the desktop-app void.”

FriendFeed

Lived 8 years

“Social aggregator from ex-Googlers. Facebook acquired it for the team (who built much of modern FB) and ran it for six years.”

Friendster

Lived 13 years

“The first social network to hit 1 million users — three years before Facebook. Pivoted to gaming, then died quietly.”

Orkut

Lived 10 years

“Google's social network. Massively popular in Brazil and India, ignored in the US. Killed for Google+.”

Google Reader

Lived 8 years

“The beloved RSS reader killed when Google decided social was the future. Triggered a decade of mourning by power users.”

iGoogle

Lived 8 years

“Customisable Google homepage with widgets. Killed because "modern web apps deliver the same functionality".”

MSN / Windows Live Messenger

Lived 14 years

“The IM client that ate AIM in Europe and most of the world. Replaced by Skype after Microsoft bought it.”

Posterous

Lived 5 years

“Blog by email. Beloved by writers. Killed a year after Twitter acqui-hired the team.”

Google Wave

Lived 3 years

“Real-time collaborative communication. So far ahead of its time nobody could figure out what it was for.”

Google Buzz

Lived 1 year

“Bolted onto Gmail without asking. Launched with a privacy fiasco. Replaced by Google+ a year later.”

GeoCities

Lived 15 years

“Free homepages organised by "neighborhood". Animated GIFs, MIDI files, hit counters. The aesthetic foundation of the early web.”