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Google Fusion Tables Shutting Down
- nowarninglabel 8y agoThis one hurts because I recommended to and helped a number of business users to use Fusion tables as an alternative to building out something in-house. It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives.
- css 8y agoThere is an entire section where they not only list and link to the alternatives but also describe how they can act as a replacement.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> It's really weird for them to write: "Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains" and then not actually provide any alternatives. It would be really weird for them to do that, but the sentence you quote is immediately followed by a bulleted, annotated list of alternatives (stripped of descriptions, those listed are: Google BigQuery, Google Cloud SQL, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, and an upcoming set of new map visualization tools that you can sign up for info about.)
- chaosmachine 8y agoGoogle Fusion Tables and the Fusion Tables API will be turned down December 3, 2019 Anyone else put off by the ridiculous use of "turned down" here? "Turned off", maybe.
- jashkenas 8y agoYes, I think it's fascinating! It seems to be a new euphemism for "shutdown" that they've been using (perhaps first internally?) for the past year or two. A few other examples: https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/announcing-turndown-of-deprecated.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/announcing-turndown-... https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprecation https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprec... https://plus.google.com/+LesiaSliusarenkoCM/posts/AiyjSfWJjAj https://plus.google.com/+LesiaSliusarenkoCM/posts/AiyjSfWJjA...
- djtriptych 8y agoIt's an improvement from "sunsetting" which was in vogue for a while.
- puzzle 8y agoIt might be surprising to outsiders and perhaps it shouldn't spill out, but it's pretty normal lingo inside Google engineering. You turn up things (services, clusters, products) and later turn them down.
- devoply 8y agoDouble speak at a company that does no evil. Color me surprised. I prefer the verb kill. Google gives life to certain services and then kills them.
- puzzle 8y agoYou are ascribing motives that don't exist. It's not double speak, if you're referring to 1984: it's just that "turning down" is the converse of "turning up". That's a fairly simple and straightforward explanation, no matter how unfortunate it turns out to be. Most of the time, it's used when an internal service moves: it turns up in X and turns down in Y. I'm not sure what your motives are, but I know that you're off mark here.
- Quanttek 8y agoVery sad about this. I was searching for a good online, collaborative database, where I can define clear schemas and provide certain views on it, for a small, public database a few friends and me are working on. Fusion Tables seemed to fit the bill as Google Sheets was basically too unstructured for this (basically I tried to find a free, collaborative, simple MS Access)
- simonw 8y agoAirtable is almost exactly that: a collaborative, simple MS access. It's free for up to 1,200 records, then $10/user/month for more https://airtable.com/pricing https://airtable.com/pricing
- mthoms 8y agoAnother vote for Airtable. It's truly a game changer.
- Quanttek 8y agoThanks! I've considered it before but not sure anymore why I did not choose it. Though it probably relates to the fact that we are a small volunteer project with insecure funding (i.e. currently none) that tries to keep a records database of contact information up-to-date. This goes hand-in-hand with complex permission management/input controls (i.e. those listed should be able to submit a request for modification or for adding their record) and the possibility for integrating the result in a website. I don't think such integration tools are included in the free version
- xiphias2 8y agoWhy don't you just ask them if you could use it for free? It's not much cost to them and they could do something good.
- js4ever 8y agoTry https://cloudbackend.appdrag.com https://cloudbackend.appdrag.com It's a serverless db (and API builder), with structured types and full sql support, also provide a cool UI, Visual SQL, an API and can be shared to co-workers. You get 500 records for free and 50k records for $10/month (unlimited users)
- xabi 8y agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- rocky1138 8y agoI'll never forgive them for BufferBox.
- FactolSarin 8y agoThat site lists smartphones like the Nexus One. Do they expect Google to support every smartphone forever?
- unixhero 8y agoWell. To be fair. It was killed.
- aogl 8y agoAnother Google product bites the dust
- catacombs 8y agoAll the more reason to use R, pandas, SQL and other open source, database projects.
- andybak 8y agoI find it hard to see much overlap between this product and any of the things you listed - except in the broadest sense.
- catacombs 8y agoIt's better to rely on code-based data tools, like those I mentioned, than "experimental" Google projects that'll get "turned down" at the drop of a hat.
- bishala 8y agoI hope we don't hear news of Google sunsetting any more of their products in 2018(first Google Plus and now Fusion Tables).
- Nickersf 8y agoGood the more of their products are shut down the less their communist grip on tech holds. Google is evil.
- sctb 8y agoEven if you feel that way, could you please not post it on Hacker News, and instead comment civilly and substantively? This isn't the place uninformative inflammation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gaius 8y agoWhat percentage market share does a Google product need to dip below to be culled? I was wondering this today when the G+ shutdown was accelerated - it was at 0.14%. Could this be used as an early warning sign?
- cetico 8y agoI worked at Google for almost 10 years. In my experience, these end-of-life projects often get shutdown because nobody wants to work on them. There are a ton of interesting projects at Google for people to work on, so people select for interesting things with potential high-impact. If a team can't be formed to own the product, maybe someone will volunteer to take care of it in their 20% time. But there are these company-wide mandates to move production systems from a storage system to a newer one, and a part-timer doesn't see the point of doing such thankless job. Management can also play a role. If a VP wanted to support the product, it would get supported. But they use the basic heuristic as above ("is this an interesting project with high potential impact"). In this analysis a VP is just a proxy for 100 engineers making the same decision.
- Seanny123 8y agoWhelp, there goes my laboratory updates repository. We were using each Google Fusion Table cell as a pre-formatted text-box which we could then sort and search. Does anyone know of any alternatives for this purpose? I made [a post](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/49546/2134 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/49546/2134) describing the requirements for what is essentially a "sortable and searchable pre-formatted text post publisher" and I keep running into related use cases.
- danso 8y agoIt's a shame, but not a surprise. I used to teach Fusion Tables to journalists [0] as a gateway into the power of SQL/relationships. The merge functionality was an effective if watered-down version of a proper SQL join, but it got the point across in a way that VLOOKUP couldn't. But Fusion Tables's killer function was its integration with Google Maps. For novice users who couldn't build a simple HTML page to to save their lives, Fusion Tables was an incredible way to create a powerful interactive with data. I stopped teaching FT because several years ago because it seemed clear, in an implicit way, that it wasn't getting the traction. I hardly ever heard anyone inside or outside of Google talk/tweet/etc about it, in the same way people do for Sheets or BigQuery. I missed the easy data-to-interactive-map workflow for teaching, but for production work, FT was just too clunky (and merge far too limited compared to a SQL join) to justify using as a data store. [0] http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping-with-fusion-tables/ http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping...
- Zaheer 8y agoAww man, time to migrate my side-project. I used fusion tables essentially as a DB + Frontend. I scraped a bunch of review data on colognes / perfumes and sorted them based on sillage (projection) / longevity: http://fragrances.ziggymo.com/ http://fragrances.ziggymo.com/
- reflexer 8y agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/