Google sets a new record, shuts down a service after only three months

Area 120's Museletter launched in September and it's already gone

Google has such a knack for killing apps and services that it's kind of become a meme at this point. Google usually waits at least a few years before deciding to end a project for good. The company might actually have set a new record now, however. Area 120's Museletter service is being sunset on December 20th, after launching as recently as September. And no, I'm not talking about September 2020, or 2019. I'm talking 2021. It only survived for three months.

We've covered Museletter previously, but in case you don't know what it is, it's a service that allows users to put together and create newsletters and share them with subscribers, in a similar fashion to Twitter/Revue. It was opened in early access in September and didn't even launch to the public. Museletter's shutdown announcement even mentions that since the public-facing content creation tools didn't even get a chance to go live, there's no user data to export.

While it may seem surprising that Google would kill this project after just three months, we need to remember that this is, after all, an experiment. Area 120 is Google's experimental incubator where employees can work on personal pet projects, and if it's good enough, it'll graduate back to Google and launch as a proper service or product. A lot of those experiments fail, though. So as for why this might have been killed, it may just come down to the experiment not actually working out and needing to be shelved.

This is the part where we'd tell you that you have until December 20th to switch to another newsletter-making service, but Museletter didn't even actually go public. So let's just remember this as one of Google's shortest-lived experiments ever.

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