For 13 years, Google has offered up an online newsletter called Google Friends that offered updates on various projects and activities at the company. As described at Tech Crunch, the newsletter was started by its co-founder Larry Page while the Google search engine was still on the Internet servers at Stanford University. This week, the Google Friends newsletter sent out its last edition signaling an end to a form of communication by the company that has since been taken up by other outlets.
In its final message, the newsletter stated its reason for not sending out any more editions, saying, "We started the Official Google Blog in 2004 and joined Twitter in 2009, and we’ve seen dramatic growth on those channels. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to this newsletter has remained flat, so we’ve concluded that this format is no longer the best way for us to get the word out about new Google products and services."
While the newsletter might not be producing any more issues, all of the previous editions are still available to read and search through in the Google Friends archive. It remains a fascinating way to see how this start up that began with a search engine for the Internet has grown and evolved into the massive company it is today. Google now has its fingers in pretty much all aspects of the Internet and more recently into operating systems like Android and Chrome and hardware like Google"s own smartphones and this summer"s launch of the Chromebook.