Goodbye, Google Friends!

Google Friends is Google's monthly newsletter that incorporated the latest announcements and product releases. 13 years after the first newsletter issue, Google announced that Google Friends will be retired.

It's hard to consider, but this monthly missive is now 13 years old. We hope you've enjoyed reading it over time, and required you to know that we are retiring it in its current form.

As you may know, the Google Friends Newsletter was shaped by Larry Page in April 1998, when Google was still on Stanford servers. In the early days, the Friends notes offered newsy details like "We are gearing up to do another crawl. We should start within a few weeks" and tips on tweaking your search queries.

Obviously a lot has happened since then, counting changes in how we communicate updates to all of you. So this will be our last Google Friends Newsletter. We in progress the Official Google Blog in 2004 and joined Twitter in 2009, and we've seen dramatic growth on those channels. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to this newsletter has remained flat, so we've completed that this format is no longer the best way for us to get the word out about new Google products and services.

Google Friends started as an eGroups mailing list, then it became a Yahoo Group and was later enthused to Google Groups. "We used the company eGroups to mass-mail our Google Friends newsletter to users, because Larry's brother, Carl, was one of eGroups founders. Larry had done the pattern for the original eGroups server himself, and for a while the company's computational heart has lived under his desk. The same week we announced our deal with Yahoo, Yahoo announced they were buying eGroups for $428 million (Yahoo has been very kind to the Page family)," remembers the former Google marketing director Douglas Edwards.

The early issues of the newsletter take in a geek-friendly changelog of Google's search engine. You'll find about the long-gone operator flink: (forward links), the PageRank bar displayed next to each search result and Google's plans to "have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages".

"After combining our web server and search engine for better performance, we have been experiencing intermittent problems with our system being down for short amounts of time fairly regularly. If you have trouble getting to the system, try back in a minute or two, and it should be back up." (July 1998)

This is a paragraph you'll never find in a Google blog post, Twitter message or a recent Google Friends issue.

Google Promotes Google Accounts

Google created a new Web page that explains users why it's a good quality idea to create a Google account. "One name, one password. That's all you need. Its free. Take a look at how you can personalize and optimize your knowledge across all Google products and services."

Using a Google account, you can share photos, track your favorite stocks, get more storage for your email, share your schedule, create web pages and work together on documents, make free phone calls and chat face to face, get modified search results and personalized news, create custom maps and get the same experience on multiple devices. There's a lot you can do if you have a Google account.

While most of the new Google services and skin require an account, back in January 2005 Google didn't have many services that necessary authentication. As the Wayback Machine shows, the initial services obtainable with a Google account were Google Groups, Google Alerts, Google Answers and Google Web APIs, but Google promised that "in the future, your Google account will give access to all Google programs requiring sign in including: Google AdWords, Google Store and more." One year later, Google previously offered Froogle, Personalized Search and a Personalized Homepage and it was preparing to launch Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Writely and to obtain YouTube.

Google Groups Tests a New Interface

Google Groups tests a new border that seems to be enthused by Google Reader. There are a lot of great new features: keyboard shortcuts, endless scrolling, search box autocomplete, a mobile version, addition with Google Profiles and a rich text editor for composing messages.

The new account of Google Groups hasn't replaced the old version because it's not finished and there are still many issues to solve. The right sidebar shows a lot of unexciting information (announcements, recent searches), but doesn't list your groups. You need to click on "my groups" to see this list and you can also add some of the groups to your favorites. Another subject is that the new interface no longer has a digest view that shows a small snippet from the first message of a thread.

"When you sign in to Google Groups, you'll see a link to sample the new Google Groups. Once there, you can make it your evasion view (and you can switch back to the old version if you ever need it). We're eager about sharing these improvements with you, but this is just a start; we're working on improved spam controls, moderation, search, and other features to make Google Groups the best way to connect in discussions. We also want to hear your thoughts, ideas, and any issue you encounter, so please add to our Product Ideas page," suggests Google.