PDFMeNot, in case you have forgotten, is was a online PDF viewer that would let you view PDF documents in the browser without requiring any desktop software.

The service was initially developed by Stateless Systems, an Australian start-up that is also behind the very popular BugMeNot.com (a web service for bypassing online registration forms) and OurSignal.com (its a beautiful news aggregator).

Google has quietly acquired the PDFMeNot.com domain from Stateless Systems, they have shut-down the original service and the domain is now getting redirected to docs.google.com/viewer which, like PDFMeNot, is also an online document viewer.

Though there was no official announcement from Google, it looks like the domain transfer happened sometime last month according to the whois records:

PDFMENOT.COM
Registrar: Directi Internet Solutions
Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Updated Date: 08-feb-2010
Creation Date: 28-jan-2008
Expiration Date: 28-jan-2011

The original PDFMeNot only supported the PDF format while Google Docs Viewer can read both PowerPoint and PDF files so that’s a good thing for users.

The downside (or upside?) is that PDFMeNot would render PDF files in SWF (Flash) format while Google Docs Viewer converts files to the HTML format which is not always very accurate. H/t @PDFtoFlash.

Google Quietly Acquires PDFMeNot PDF Viewer

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.