One Today

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

~ the goodbye ~

The email went out on 27 January 2020 and did not spend long on the sentiment. "We launched Google One Today seven years ago to help people donate to causes they care about. In the last few years, we have seen donors choose other products to fundraise for their favorite nonprofits." Then the date: the app would stop on 6 February. Ten days, one weekend included, to wind up something that had been taking people's money since 2013.

What it did was small and well-shaped. Each day it showed one nonprofit project and a short description of what the money would buy, and the ask was a dollar. If you liked it you could put in a dollar, and if you liked it a lot you could pass it to other people and watch what they added. Nothing about the interaction took longer than the time between two subway stops, and that was the design brief rather than an accident of it.

The wind-down itself was handled correctly. Many are not. New nonprofits had already been barred from signing up. Every donation made before 6 February was passed to the charity it had been designated for. On the day itself the app was switched off and the open projects were deleted, campaigns and progress bars included, whether or not they had reached the number they were asking for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a dollar a day ~

One Today came out of Google.org rather than out of the product organization, and it showed in how it was released. It went into a pilot in April 2013, invitation-only, Android only, with the first write-ups on 18 April and a Hacker News thread the next day that took 97 points and 40 comments. Opening it up took until August 2013, when every Android user in the United States could install it. An iPhone build followed later.

The money went through Network for Good, a Washington processor that had been doing this since the late nineties. It vetted the organizations and distributed the funds through donor-advised accounts. That arrangement let a team that was not a payments company ship something quickly. It also fixed the app's reach on the day it launched.

The giving model was the interesting part and remains unresolved. A dollar is below the floor where most people stop to think, so the pitch was that the decision cost nothing and the aggregate would be large. Google's own explanation for the ending says that donors went to other products, and seven years is long enough for that to be a real finding rather than an excuse.

~ the vetting layer ~

Nobody in Turkey could install it, me included. One Today was a United States product for its entire life, tied to a US processor and to US registered charities, and it was never offered anywhere else. Nothing stalled on the way to a wider launch and no local rival got there first. The app had a jurisdiction the way a tax deduction has a jurisdiction, and everybody outside it was simply not in the addressable market.

~ the page that kept asking ~

The archive caught onetoday.google.com on 8 February 2020, two days after the service stopped. The page was still the full marketing site. "Give a little. Change a lot." at the top, with a GET THE APP block underneath still offering both the Android and the iPhone builds. Below that the featured projects were running their pitches as usual, e-books against illiteracy and food aid for Syria among them. None of those links went anywhere by then.

Point a browser at the host now and it bounces through a Google sign-in and lands on the donation history page at donate.google.com, where the surviving giving tools ended up. The old subdomain has no page of its own left, not even a farewell.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »