Did you know this existed? A portion of Amazon Local was overhauled into Amazon Destinations earlier this year; it was essentially a place you could go to book short local trips. That was in late April. Six months later, it just disappeared.

Amazon offers one of the many music services that can scan your existing library and match it up in the cloud, but to do that, it launched a dedicated scanning app back in 2012. As of 2015, it wasn't exactly necessary anymore — Amazon now has a dedicated Prime Music app — and so its Music Importer app was shut down.

One of the cooler features that Amazon tried on its app store was Test Drive, which let you run emulated Android apps right in the browser. It didn't work for every app — and not everything in the app would even work — but it was still a compelling idea, especially since most app stores don't even offer demos. Test Drive launched alongside Amazon's app store in 2011; it was shut down four years and one month later.

Amazon's video service originally launched in 2006 under the terrible name Unbox, but by 2015, Unbox had simply become the app through which you could download and stream the many movies and TV shows sold by the Amazon Video store. Still, there was one reason to use it: storing rented movies for offline viewing. Unfortunately, Amazon has since discontinued Unbox as it goes all in on streaming.

Amazon took a half step into mobile payments in mid-2014 and then pulled out half a year later. The Amazon Wallet app allowed people with Android or Fire devices to store and use their loyalty and gift cards. It seemed like the app might one day hold actual credit cards, but it apparently wasn't successful enough for that.

Imagine Venmo, but on Amazon.com and no one you know used it. That's Amazon WebPay, an online service that allowed you to pay people you know through Amazon. The service had been around since at least 2009 and was finally shut down because Amazon felt it wasn't really doing a better job of sending payments than any other service.

Imagine a quaint and casually gamified message board where people gather just to ask questions, like "How do I get my horse to stop cribbing?" and "Where is the Jedi Mind Tricks album cover for 'Violent by Design' from?" That's Askville. It lived from 2006 to 2013, when it closed its boards. They're still online for anyone who wants to read through them.

Back in 2007, Amazon launched a fashion site called Endless that mostly sold shoes and accessories for women. It survived until 2012, when Amazon decided to fold Endless into its core site to better take on higher-end clothing sales. It's something that Amazon is still trying to do today.

Several blog posts inform me that a small contingent of people were really into an old Amazon feature that let you set up reminders to be emailed to you down the road. Amazon killed the feature in 2012 and replaced it with, well, basically the same feature. It's now called Friends & Family Gifting, and it also encourages you to buy stuff on those special occasions.

It turns out that Amazon doesn't like it when you host classified documents on its servers. WikiLeaks had been using Amazon hosting while publishing documents leaked to it by Chelsea Manning, and eventually it got cut off. Amazon later said it was simply a matter of WikiLeaks failing to follow its terms of service, which — in fairness — is probably accurate. WikiLeaks apparently returned on other hosting later in the day. (I realize that this technically doesn't count as an Amazon service being shut down, nor an obscure one, but it's one of the more fascinating things that Amazon has shut down.)

This entire timeline is in reverse chronological order so I could save my favorite Amazon shutdown for last: Amazon used to have a service that literally sold bulk screenshots of webpages for $0.0002 per thumbnail. It was supposed to be a way of offloading server work to Amazon when a website or search engine wanted to display information from a lot of external sites at once, which makes some sense, even if it sounds like something that would make for a bad website. Either way, the abstracted idea of buying bulk thumbnails is incredible.