I’ve been writing recently about some services of old that are returning such as Digg and Vine. But there are some apps and services that have been spun up, used by lots of people, and then disappeared, never to be seen again.

These Apps or Services have left a hole in some hearts:

• GeoCities (Shut down in 2009)
• MySpace (Culturally faded around 2008-2009, effectively buried after its 2011 sale)
• Google Wave (Shut down in 2012)
• MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger (2013, migrated to Skype)
• Google Reader (Shut down in 2013)
• iGoogle (Shut down in 2013)
• Posterous (Shut down in 2013)
• Turntable.fm (Original service shut down in 2013)
• Google Latitude (Shut down in 2013)
• Bebo (Original social network effectively died around 2013, with later attempted revivals)
• Springpad (Shut down in 2014)
• Orkut (Shut down in 2014)
• FriendFeed (Shut down in 2015)
• Yahoo Pipes (Shut down in 2015)
• Rdio (Shut down in 2015)
• Grooveshark (Shut down in 2015)
• Google Code (Shut down in 2016)
• Picasa Web Albums (Shut down in 2016)
• Mailbox (Shut down in 2016)
• Sunrise Calendar (Shut down in 2016)
• Meerkat (Shut down in 2016)
• AOL Instant Messenger / AIM (Shut down in 2017)
• App.net (Shut down in 2017)
• Vine (Shut down in 2017)
• Delicious / del.icio.us (Shut down in 2017)
• StumbleUpon (Shut down in 2018)
• Xmarks (Shut down in 2018)
• Pebble watch services (Company ended in 2016, online services ended in 2018)
• Path (Shut down in 2018)
• Google+ (Shut down in 2019)
• Google Inbox (Shut down in 2019)
• Google Allo (Shut down in 2019)
• Wunderlist (Shut down in 2020)
• Yahoo Answers (Shut down in 2021)
• Periscope (Shut down in 2021)
• Google Hangouts, consumer version (Phased out into Google Chat, fully wound down by 2022)
• Apollo for Reddit (Shut down in 2023)
• Tweetbot (Shut down in 2023)
• Twitterrific (Shut down in 2023)
• Reddit is Fun / rif (Shut down in 2023)
• Dark Sky (Shut down in 2023)
• TinyLetter (Shut down in 2024)
• Cohost (Shut down in 2025)

This list, while large, is by no means exhaustive. The more obscure ones are the most interesting.

For me, it has to be Google Reader, as it opened up news-reading across multiple sources to the mainstream in an easy to use way, and while the backbone technology, RSS, is still around today, it’s not used to the extent it was back in the day.

What app or service do you miss the most?

This is part of my little Hello, Question series. The previous one was: [What Vintage Tech Hill Are You Willing to Die On?]