Official line
Service shutting down.
Google · Social · Feature
Google Moderator
Discontinued
Feature
2008–2015 · 7 years in market
Launched
Jan 1, 2008
Discontinued
Jun 30, 2015
Cause of death
Low usage
Evidence
Unsourced
What was it?
Crowd-ranked questions for town halls and keynotes. Quietly useful, quietly killed.
Why it died
Editorial reading
A feature in search of a surface. Slides and YouTube did not need a separate app.
Founder takeaway
Internal tools that leak as products need distribution. A White House demo is not retention.
Sources
Unsourced — editorial reading
No primary source is attached yet. Treat the interpretation as editorial, not a citation.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
RIP
Google Reader
2005–2013 · 8 yrs
The RSS reader a generation of journalists and power users treated as a daily driver. Killed as RSS faded and Google chased social.
Media & Publishing/Low usage+39
Feature
RIP
Google Sidewiki
2009–2011 · 2 yrs
A browser sidebar for commenting on any page. The open web’s last annotation dream at Google.
Social/Low usage+35
RIP
Google Spaces
2016–2017 · 1 yr
A lightweight group chat with cards for links, photos, and polls. Lasted less than a year.
Messaging/Low usage+30
RIP
Fusion Tables
2009–2019 · 10 yrs
A friendly visualization layer on tabular data. Power-user niche, replaced in spirit by BigQuery + Looker.
Cloud & Infra/Low usage+21