Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

Did that 20% time actually bring anything useful at Google, or it's just a myth?

IIRC, both Gmail and AdSense mentioned in the title didn't come to Google as 20% byproducts, but as acquisitions.

Does anyone know of any popular (by Google standards) product that started that way?

Transit directions on Maps started as a 20% project.

It's just one single feature of one of the projects. If that's the poster child of 20% projects then that's good enough reason to ditch them.

Transit compiles schedule data from hundreds of worldwide transit agencies, does custom pathfinding and is a pretty sophisticated project all on its own. It's not gmail, sure, but there are entire companies that do the same thing as this "one single feature."

Also, as others have pointed out repeatedly, 20% has not been "ditched." And this isn't a poster child, it's just one example.

Transit directions have been a big reason why some people prefer Google Maps to (say) Apple's maps. In places like New York or Tokyo, it's a huge win for users. It's also spawned an open specification (Google Transit Feed Specification) that has sparked a ton of innovation in the public transit space, including real-time location updates from public transit authorities.

Full disclosure: one of the big leaders of the Google Transit project was Avichal Garg, who was a PM for the webspam team when he ramped up Google Transit in his 20% time.