Google Retires 13-Year-Old ‘Google Friends’ Newsletter

‘Google Friends’ a charming thirteen year old newsletter that a few old-time techies still subscribed to has decided to shut down today, citing flat subscription numbers and the prominence of Google news on Twitter and the official Google blog as impetus for its retirement.

Created by co-founder and current CEO Larry Page on April 29, 1998, the newsletter started while Google was on the Stanford servers and provided fans with incremental Google updates like ” I created a new logo using Gimp (of course).” Seriously though, run through the archives it’s awesome.

From the last Google missive:

“Obviously a lot has happened since then, including changes in how we communicate updates to all of you. So this will be our last Google Friends Newsletter. 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.”

Google recommends that the Google faithful now get their news from The Official Google Blog, vertical blogs like the Chrome and AdSense blog or the various Google Twitter accounts.  While one might take the move as indicative of a larger trend of how Twitter is killing all other forms of communication blah blah blah, it might just be that the search engine is now way too big for its britches email newsletter.