I don’t know if it’s because it’s the end of the year or the end of the decade or the end of publishing, but I’ve been thinking a lot about things that are no longer with us. Not important things — just websites and brands and failed technological solutions. Things like the CueCat.

Who can forget the CueCat? Nine years ago it was going to save publishing (just check the Romenesko logs) by allowing people to scan bar codes in newspapers and magazines and access websites and online coupons without using a keyboard. And it was shaped like a cat. This, of course, was a colossal failure. (I dropped the “C” word in the #ebooksummit hashtag last week to see if anyone remembered this debacle. Either a) no one did, b) people remembered but dared not revisit the folly, or c) they found my use of the hashtag for retro-fail gags obnoxious, which I can respect.) Joel Spolsky’s reaction to the device said it all. “The number of dumb things going on here exceeds my limited ability to grok all at once,” he wrote in 2000 (the “grok” really gives it away, doesn’t it?). “I’m a bit overwhelmed with what a feeble business idea this is.”

But a business it was, for awhile. Forbes, Belo-owned papers like the Dallas Morning News, and even Wired were all in. And now you can’t even get a yuck off of it in a hashtag? Now that’s failure. I note it only because it’s funny — I’d forgotten that it was actually shaped like a cat — and because it serves as a cautionary tale. All kinds of scanners and readers and augmented-reality apps are again taking wing (and more than their share of hype), and — as Spolsky noted then — it’s difficult to see what problem they solve. Typing is just not that difficult. And there might be a form-factor message here for the e-reader market as well. Just because something displays books doesn’t mean it has to look like one, no more than the CueCat needed to look like an actual cat.