Shoelace was one of Google Area 120's experimental projects. It launched in July 2019 and was limited to New York City. It was an interest-based social app. Users could organize events called 'Loops', and the app would show them to those with similar interests. If users were interested, they would state their intent to attend.
In April 2020, Area 120 announced that they were shutting down Shoelace. In an FAQ document on their site, they explained that Area 120 was a platform for Google to test various ideas and that the experimental apps there weren’t an indication for Google’s future priorities.
They further noted that “given the current health crisis, we don’t feel that now is the right time to invest further in this project.” And considering the social distancing restrictions caused by the pandemic, the decision wasn’t much of a surprise. It would have been tricky to develop an event-oriented social service when no events were possible.
Users were given till May 12, 2020, to save their data, after which all content was deleted.
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