Remembering 'The Tech That Died in 2023'
"10 years later, the demise of Google Reader still stings," writes PC Magazine. But "Time marches on and corporate priorities shift. Here are the products and services that took a final bow in 2023..." Some of the highlights?'Clubhouse' Clones In the early days of the pandemic, when Zoom happy hours and sourdough starters proliferated, Clubhouse burst onto the scene with an app that facilitated audio-only chats between groups large and small. Tech giants quickly churned out their own Clubhouse clones, but these party-line throwbacks were not long for this world. Facebook was the first to go, ditching its Live Audio Rooms in December 2022, but 2023 also saw the end of Reddit Talk, Spotify Live, and Amazon's live radio DJ Amp app. [X Spaces is still around] Amazon Smile Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile saw Amazon donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases made through smile.amazon.com to charity, with consumers able to choose from over a million charitable organizations to support. On Feb. 20, however, the program shut down because it "has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped," Amazon said at the time. NFTs on Facebook and Instagram Remember non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? Somehow, crypto bros convinced people to spend big bucks on what are essentially JPEGs. (Don't try to convince me otherwise.) Meta got in on the action in 2022, allowing Instagram users to create NFTs and Facebook users to share them. It didn't exactly set either social network on fire and Meta said in March it would be "winding down digital collectibles." Cortana on Windows In June, AI claimed its latest victim by coming after Microsoft's Cortana. The voice assistant never really made a splash compared to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, and with the launch of Bing Chat (now Copilot), Microsoft removed Cortana as a built-in app on Windows. Also on the list are Blizzard's Overwatch League, third-party Reddit clients, and Venmo as a payment option on Amazon (effective this January 10). Looking further into the future, Gmail's Basic HTML View disappears in 2024, while Wordpad will eventually be removed in an unspecified future release of Windows.
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