Google Schemer

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

~ the goodbye ~

i missed schemer. it launched in december 2011 as an invite-only google experiment, sat on the android store with somewhere between a hundred thousand and half a million installs, and was already abandoned by october 2012 when the last app update shipped. the formal shutdown was announced on january 10 2014 with a data-export window that closed on february 7.

the pitch was a social bucket list. you wrote down things you wanted to do, the app suggested things based on what your friends had scheme'd, and partners like food network and zagat seeded the recommendations. it tied into google plus for the social layer. when google plus started to wobble, schemer had no second leg to stand on.

i was 27 when this launched and already deep in computer engineer work in ankara. the bucket-list app genre never made it past english-speaking tech press into my orbit. by the time the shutdown post hit hacker news in january 2014 it read like a product i had never heard of being closed by a team i could not name.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

schemer let you tag a "scheme" with a location, mark it as done, and follow other people's schemes for ideas. the recommendation engine pulled from google search history and google plus circles. the partner content was the closest the app got to a real consumer hook, restaurant lists from zagat, travel suggestions from national geographic, recipes from food network.

none of that was wrong as a concept. it just sat in a crowded 2011 to 2012 window with foursquare, pinterest, and any number of bucket-list iphone apps. google never marketed it past the launch coverage on techcrunch and the verge. the team seemed to know that by mid-2012 when the updates stopped.

~ the postmortem ~

the death notice went out on the schemer blog on january 10 2014. four sentences. data export until february 7, app removed from the play store the same day. the eweek headline read "google shutters its schemer activity planner app" and the android police writeup was the most detailed coverage. no farewell tour, no migration path, no acquired-by post.

~ what got buried with it ~

schemer is one of those entries in the google graveyard that nobody asks about. its peers in the 2011 to 2014 spring cleaning sweep, [[google-buzz]] and [[google-sidewiki]] and the early casualties of the google plus consolidation, all had more cultural footprint. schemer was the quiet one. an experiment that ran the full beta to deprecation arc without ever becoming a product anyone defended.

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