It's interesting that I'm so conditioned at this point, I read the title as "closing soon".

I thought this was simply product that I hadn't heard about before, and Google was pulling the plug on it.

I don't get the "Google shutting down a product" meme. I can't think of anything they've shutdown without a replacement, except for Reader. Are people still sour about that?

This Wikipedia article provides a pretty large list if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

It's not just Google, a lot of tech companies have been shutting down services that are relatively popular (e.g. Parse).

I'm sure they will while this is still on the front page.

Their marketing[1] site does a better job at describing what it actually does.

[1] https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/

Goolge had a similar product called Google Website Optimizer that it shut down years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Website_Optimizer

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2661700?hl=en

Some screenshots still floating around:

http://imgur.com/a/eReWQ

http://imgur.com/a/7XydI

"Shut down" is a little deceptive:

"Google announced that GWO as a separate product would be retired as of 1 August 2012, and its functionality would be integrated into Google Analytics as Google Analytics Content Experiments."

They just merged it into another product, where it still exists today: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745152?hl=en

I wonder how is this Google Optimize different from what's available in GA today.

I really hate that you have to log in to see anything google these days, be it blogs or even regular websites :/

The proper landing page (as posted above as well) does not need a login: https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/

Just want to note that, on iOS at least, I cannot access the announcement without first signing in to a Google account. Perhaps there's a more neutral source for information relating to the announcement that doesn't require Google sign in?

And again Google is doing the same mistake of hyping a thing and limiting it to just invitees. By the time they launch it no one would care.

"Advanced statistical modeling

Optimize uses Bayesian statistical methods to model the real-world performance of your experiments, giving you more accurate results."

Since this is basically a landing page, I find it interesting that "Bayesian" was the adjective used to amplify "statistics". They're targeting to the right market (as you would expect from Google, of course)

I've tried the beta of this. It's really interesting.

What did you find interesting about it? How does it compare to Optimizely?

How does this differ than just regular A/B testing tools?

And Optimizely is available today.

Except Google Optimize will be free[1]. There's services that I've used with free plans that I later upgraded to paid plans (Mouseflow and Gleam.io come to mind), just because I knew I wasn't going to be hassled after a 14 or 30 day trial. Sadly that is not the case with Optimizely. I would personally wait for Google Optimize to come out of beta.

1. https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/compare/

I wonder if they will Optimize the grey Google logo color against that red header. Hurts my eyes.

I especially like the word "beta" which is the same color as the background. I tried to select the logo after you pointed it out and stumbled on that.

Seems like the background color changed after they picked font colors and they forgot to adjust.

It could be following Material design guidelines.

The latest version of the iOS Gmail app (v5, released back in the Nov) now uses a red banner as well and it was so eye-bleedingly distracting I had to find a way to intercept my request to the AppStore to download the old version again.

What's crazy too is that after the version bump, Google had to release 7 updates in succession to regain most of the functionality they lost (and probably to reset the mediocre App Store ratings).

If anyone wants/needs to revert back to the old 4.x version of the Gmail app, lemme know and I can post up some resources.

Material design is a disaster for usability. Android became a bloated, spaced out mess, where you'd fit three menu items on a six inch screen. Information density on the desktop is a joke too.

You can genuinely see more content on an old 3.5 inch iPhone screen than on a 5.2 inch Android screen. Open the Settings app, for example.

Then there's the FAB buttons that go over the top of content, and right where your thumb wants to scroll.

Yeah, lack of content density was yet another reason why I reverted. Too much space was being spent on unnecessary elements like the ubiquitous circle avatars. icanreadthankyou.