
Google Fusion Tables Shutting Down - ceocoder
https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/9185417
======
chaosmachine
_Google 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.

~~~
puzzle
It 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
Double 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
You 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.

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Quanttek
Very 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
Airtable 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)

~~~
Quanttek
Thanks! 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
Why 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.

------
xabi
[https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

~~~
rocky1138
I'll never forgive them for BufferBox.

~~~
hu3
Reader for me

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catacombs
All the more reason to use R, pandas, SQL and other open source, database
projects.

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andybak
I find it hard to see much overlap between this product and any of the things
you listed - except in the broadest sense.

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catacombs
It'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.

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danso
It'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...](http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping-
with-fusion-tables/)

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bishala
I hope we don't hear news of Google sunsetting any more of their products in
2018(first Google Plus and now Fusion Tables).

~~~
jks
The end of Inbox was announced in 2018 too.

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aogl
Another Google product bites the dust

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nowarninglabel
This 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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.)

~~~
zepto
I wonder which of these has a better projected lifespan?

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DannyBee
Fusion tables was alive for 9 years, so ...

~~~
zepto
Some of those are living on borrowed time then.

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Seanny123
Whelp, 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.

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Zaheer
Aww 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/)

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gaius
What 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
I 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.

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reflexer
[https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

