Google‘s parent company Alphabet recently announced a massive job cut impacting 12,000 employees. The tech behemoth laid off about six percent of its global workforce. The layoff saw it reduce personnel in most of its internal teams, including the Fuchsia operating system and Area 120 incubator. Google reportedly shelved all but three Area 120 projects. According to TechCrunch, one of those is a social bookmarking tool for saving places called Liist.
Area 120 projects are usually developed in-house but Liist is a rare exception. Founded in 2019, Google quietly acquired this startup around August last year. Described as the “Pinterest for Places” by its co-founder David Friedl, the firm offered a consumer app that let users save and curate places found on the internet. You could save any location that you see on social media apps like TikTok and Instagram, as well as other online platforms.
The Liist app was shut down last year after Google acquired the firm for its Area 120 incubator. The whole team behind it, including co-founder Frieldl, became a part of the tech giant. They are now working on a “Gen Z consumer product” within Area 120. Friedl is the product manager, but not much is known about the product itself. However, Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan previously hinted at a similar discovery service. “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” he said. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organization, is suggesting that these social media platforms are eating into the company’s core services. Particularly, the new generation tends to use the likes of TikTok and Instagram for pretty much everything. Google may now be looking to defend itself against the growing popularity of these platforms with a new product developed by the Liist team. Time will tell what the company has up its sleeves.
Aloud and Checks are the other two Area 120 projects that Google kept
Besides Liist, Aloud and Checks are the other two Area 120 projects that have survived the mass layoffs at Google. The former is a cost-effective video dubbing solution that lets users quickly and easily dub their videos into multiple languages. The latter, meanwhile, is a privacy-checkup service for mobile app developers. It employs AI to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, so developers can fix those issues quickly. It is available for both Android and iOS developers.