???? – 2010retired
Lala (music service)
“It streamed your songs, shared your playlists, and quietly became the future of Apple Music.”
“Free 411, sweet talker — you dialed the world and never charged us a dime”
GOOG-411, or Google Voice Local Search, arrived in 2007 as a toll-free phone number that answered with speech recognition instead of a menu of button presses. Tell it a business and a city in the United States or Canada, and it would look it up and even place the call for you. It was the free-spirited alternative to 4-1-1, the notoriously pricey directory service run by local and long-distance phone companies.
The service was discontinued on November 12, 2010, hanging up after roughly three years of taking calls. It went out the way it came in: quietly, no tolls attached. For a brief, shining era, asking a machine for a phone number was free — and surprisingly pleasant.
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“It streamed your songs, shared your playlists, and quietly became the future of Apple Music.”
“It gave the world headphones as a lifestyle and never once asked us to share.”
“The serious one in the family, quietly keeping the servers running while everyone fawned over the desktop kids”