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Google Moderator is shutting down on June 30, 2015
- hansjorg 12y agoNever heard of this before. For anybody else wondering, it seems to be a more structured version of the IAmA subreddit.
- Igglyboo 12y agoSame here. Just wanted to chime in before everyone starts talking about how google never sticks with their products, this is relatively unknown and better alternatives exist. There is no reason to keep this service up.
- mintplant 12y agoI was frankly surprised to see it still up. I assumed it had shut down years ago.
- jedc 12y agoIt was launched in September 2008 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Moderator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Moderator
- itafroma 12y agoThe one person I saw using it, at least when it was relatively new, was Matt Cutts to organize the questions asked for the daily Google Webmasters videos. Though those seemed to have died out almost a year ago, and they had moved to the Product Forums by then anyway.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoIt was used for a US presidential election debate in 2008 and 2012. But other than influencing the course of human history it has enjoyed little traction.
- hansjorg 12y agoYes, what joy to witness such exquisite debate by those enlightened orators and masters of rhetoric. Truly something for the ages.
- DannyBee 12y agoIt was also used for the egyptian constitution :)
- donnahanafi 12y agoReally? haha. How cool, do you have any links?
- DannyBee 12y agoSome of the blog posts have died. General details are linked from footnotes in http://www.yjil.org/docs/pub/39-1-comment-randolph-the-revolutionary-spirit-in-egypt.pdf http://www.yjil.org/docs/pub/39-1-comment-randolph-the-revol... One of the moderator series is at: https://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.40&f=581e0.6a1891 https://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.4... Note that moderator is not only available in a ton of languages, it can do auto-translation between all language pairs google translate supports.
- tosh 12y agoWhat are some alternatives? I know https://www.sli.do/ https://www.sli.do/. Anything else?
- wffurr 12y agoThe big one is Reddit AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA
- donnahanafi 12y agohttps://www.mentimeter.com https://www.mentimeter.com :)
- ommunist 12y agoI have seen it only once. It was used for Obama's election campaign and they reached me with Google moderator. As it usually is, they did not even care, am I American citizen or not. Default country, what can I say.
- GauntletWizard 12y agoFunny story: When you saw it, it was scheduled for shutdown. They had an announcement all planned and were ready to start turning it down, and then they delayed it so that Obama could use it for his campaign.
- googlyfuck 12y agoSurely not! Google shutting down one of their services? Nah, they like never ever do that. /sarc
- paulsutter 12y agoGoogle used this internally to manage questions at their all-hands meetings, letting the audience upvote good questions and avoid unimportant questions. Are there any other good solutions? It's a real problem at conferences: many of the "questions" asked during the Q&A at public meetings are a waste of time, a chance to show off [1]. I found an example of Yik Yak used for this purpose [2] [1] http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/ http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/ [2] http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-future-of-conference-qa-and-the-future-is-yik-yak.html http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-futur...
- arcatek 12y agoMaybe something like Wisembly[1] ? I worked there as an intern a few years ago, and the product (and team) was great. [1] http://wisembly.com/fr/ http://wisembly.com/fr/
- komo 12y agoGoogle Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really working on it since. We have been solving many of the issues of Google Moderator with http://www.sli.do http://www.sli.do. Even some Google offices have been using sli.do at their events instead of the moderator.
- Splendor 12y agoHow do you pronounce the name of your company?
- DannyBee 12y ago"Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really working on it since.' This is not really accurate, though i guess it depends on what you consider the smartphone era.
- komo 12y agoThanks for your great comments Danny. What I meant is that the moderator was not really optimized for mobile as it was built before smartphones became dominant. It was still a solid product, that just became a bit "old" as technology progressed. As mentioned in several comments here, better alternatives (incl sli.do) are now available.
- miket 12y agoHere's a list of services Google has shut down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Buetol 12y agoNow, let's save the precious data hosted on moderator.
- javery 12y agoI have no clue what this is but I am shocked and appalled that Google would shut it down.
- MCRed 12y agoI give credit to Google for publicly announcing the shutdown and doing so in advance. (Unlike amazon that just rips products out of the site. Can't go there to find movie times anymore!)
- DannyBee 12y agoModerator is relatively unheard of because it was created by one person as a 20% project, became popular internally, but less so externally. I ended up owning it for most of its life (it was a team of 3 people at one point) Externally, we mainly used it for civics related stuff, though it saw some serious popularity in niche areas (like people using it to do youtube videos + questions), and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage. Because of how it was being used, despite being deprecated, it was kept running for many years to make sure people could find or build alternatives. (Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans :P)
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans Ironically, I think there is a connection between the first part and the last part: Google usually has well-announced shutdowns with good shutdown plans with long migration-out periods, which results in Google shutdowns spending a lot of time in the public eye (when they are first announced, when various milestones hit, and as they are in their final period), which magnifies the attention around Google product shutdowns and the impression of their significance. OTOH, its also one of the reasons I'm very comfortable using Google products -- any product can get shutdown if its not doing well enough (and a company that won't voluntarily shutdown products that aren't contributing will find itself shutting down along with its products), but at least Google usually does a good job of handling shut downs.
- asdf333 12y ago> and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage. Would you mind elaborating why it was shut down if it had accelerating usage? seems like a good reason to keep it going instead of shutting it down to the public...
- shric 12y agoRelatively unheard of is an understatement. I have been at Google for a few years and had no idea this was available externally.
- aburan28 12y agoOh wow, Google shuts down another service that all of its competitors could not possibly have launched themselves.
- aikah 12y agoNever used it or heard of it. It seems like a usefull tool though, so how come?