Google Fusion Tables

» see fusiontables.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

fusion tables showed up on my radar around 2010, at the height of my personal google-labs obsession. i was on ttnet broadband by then and reading anything the google research group published. the pitch was that you could paste a spreadsheet into a web form and get a shareable map or a shareable chart back, no schema, no server. that was rare in 2009. most of the free options were either desktop tools that produced flat images or hosted services that required a real database behind them.

the technical shape was a wide-column store for structured data with a merge operator that joined rows across tables. the interface layer produced pie charts, bar charts, line plots, scatter plots, timelines, network graphs, card layouts and geographic maps. the geographic layer is what most people remember. you dropped a csv with an address column onto the form and got back a leaflet-style map you could embed in any web page.

alon halevy and rebecca shapley announced it on 9 june 2009. it stayed on the google labs shelf for a while, then quietly moved into the wider google infrastructure without ever getting a full product launch. journalism was the killer use case. the guardian mapped iraq war deaths on top of it in 2010. crisis mappers used it to plot the 2011 tohoku earthquake and tsunami response, and small ngos treated it as a free gis layer they could point interns at.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what really happened ~

google announced the shutdown in december 2018, a year in advance, with the retirement date set for 3 december 2019. embedded maps and charts stopped rendering that day, and the api went dark on the same schedule. users could pull data out through google takeout until 3 march 2020, after which everything was deleted.

~ what replaced it ~

google pointed users at bigquery for the storage layer, cloud sql for structured data, google sheets for casual users, and google data studio for the visualization layer. none of them together did what fusion tables did in one page. the ability for a non-technical journalist to paste a csv and get an embeddable interactive map back was quietly retired along with the product.

~ the labs pattern ~

fusion tables was one of many google labs experiments that graduated into the main product line and then got sunset when the main product line lost interest. google reader, google notebook, google wave and google answers had already gone the same way by 2019. the shape is familiar: research team ships a tool, small dedicated user base forms around it, org priorities move, tool retires with a redirect to something bigger and less specific.

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