A Look Back at Google's History of Social Media Failures

In some alternate social media history, the term Crush List is a verb -- meaning to elevate a friend to the most prominent position within one’s social network. And somewhere MySpace founder Tom Anderson is cursing the name Orkut Buyukkokten -- not Mark Zuckerberg.

And in this reality, social media giant Google has more than a billion people on Orkut, the service that defined the next great Internet era after search.

The loss of Orkut is yet another sign of how social still vexes Google, a company that tinkers with autonomous cars. Sure, it has Google+, but even that strategy has its troubles to the point that tech blogs are reporting on its imminent demise, too. With Orkut gone, it’s a good time to highlight Google’s failures in social media:

• Orkut
• Dodgeball
• Latitude
• Google Buzz
• YouTube
• Google+
• Waze, Twitch