2012 – 2012retired
OS X Mountain Lion
“A steady climb, a quiet goodbye — the mountain rests.”
“A unit of knowledge, measured, and found lighter than Wikipedia.”
Knol was Google's attempt at user-written articles on a range of topics, with each piece called a knol — a unit of knowledge, per Google. Announced in December 2007 and opened in beta in July 2008 with a few hundred articles, mostly health and medical, it was led by engineering VP Udi Manber. Many saw it as a rival to Wikipedia, which alone made it worth watching.
But Knol never found a significant audience and came to be viewed as a failure. Google closed it on April 30, 2012, and deleted all content after October 1, 2012. The Internet Archive kept snapshots from July 2008 through May 2012, so the units of knowledge survive in fragments.
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“A steady climb, a quiet goodbye — the mountain rests.”
“It read the logs so you didnt have to — the quiet ancestor of every analytics dashboard.”
“It moved the Start button. We're still deciding how to feel about that.”