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10 Years Ago This Week: Google Glass Retirement, Twitch Music Library, Create a blog for your business

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015. These are three updates for the week ending January 18, 2015, which are interesting in retrospect.

Shutdown of the Google Glass Explorer Program

On January 19, 2015 Google announced they will stop selling Google Glass to individual customers via its Glass Explorer program. Google Glass was never sold as a general consumer product.


Google Glass Explorer Program Website January 17, 2015 via the Wayback Machine

There were concerns about privacy and pushback against so-called "glassholes", although it's not clear how much of that contributed to the decision to shut the program down. It may have been that the expensive glasses just weren't ready for consumers.

Google continued to update Glass for Enterprise customers, including integrating Google Meet video calling in 2020. Google stopped producing Glass in March 2023. 

But as noted last week, Google launched Android XR last month, which is planned for use with “extended reality” glasses (with Gemini AI, of course). I'm guessing we'll hear more at Google I/O, which is usually in May.

Google Domains-Blogger Integration for Business

On January 13, 2015 Google Domains fully launched in the US, no invitation required. Along with that, Google announced integration of Google Domains with Blogger blogs, as a way to "get your small business online".

Google Domains was "making it easier to get your business online"

Google definitely doesn't seem to know what it wants to do for businesses.

In 2017 Google launched a new business website builder as part of Google My Business (now Google Business Profiles), which they shut down in 2024.

Google Domains remained in beta until 2022, but that didn’t last long. They sold the Google Domains business to Squarespace in 2023.

Blogger is still plugging along though, and you can still link a custom domain for free from the domain host of your choice!

Twitch Music Library Launches

On January 14, 2015 The Twitch Music Library launched, with pre-cleared music for streamers to use live and in videos on demand. 

Twitch Music Library Launch announcement.

The Twitch Music Library seems to have been quietly phased out around 2019, with a fair number of confused streamers asking about it on Reddit. 

It was replaced by Soundtrack by Twitch in October 2020, after a huge number of streamers were hit with DMCA copyright takedowns from the music labels. It seems to have been pretty much the same thing as the Twitch Music Library.

 Soundtrack was shut down in July 2023 due to low usage. Now they just recommend 3rd party sites to get music. 

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