Official line
Low usage; Labs winding down.
Google · Social · Feature
Google Sidewiki
Discontinued
Feature
2009–2011 · 2 years in market
Launched
Sep 23, 2009
Discontinued
Dec 1, 2011
Cause of death
Low usage
Evidence
Unsourced
What was it?
A browser sidebar for commenting on any page. The open web’s last annotation dream at Google.
Why it died
Editorial reading
Annotations without a social graph are graffiti. Spam arrived before community.
Founder takeaway
Page-level comments need identity, moderation, and a reason the site owner wants them.
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 Moderator
2008–2015 · 7 yrs
Crowd-ranked questions for town halls and keynotes. Quietly useful, quietly killed.
Social/Low usage+36
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