The site devoted to helping create guided presentations is shutting down on 30-June-2009: Flowgram said in email to users that it couldn't figure out a financial model to continue. While Flowgram presentations won't be playable after 30-June or editable, they can be exported as videos. The company provided instructions:
"...You can export them to video by clicking 'share' from the website or 'more sharing options' from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section."
The Yahoo 360° social networking blog thing, which has been under a death watch for two years, finally dives 13-July-2009: The service is notable for combining blogging and a host of other things, but Yahoo couldn't either figure out how to capitalize it or develop a new service to move content to, despite such a general promise two years ago. Now the service is slated to shut down, and you can migrate any remaining content out. (Thanks, Aristotle!)
Video content sharing site Jumpcut is closing its virtual doors 15-June-2009: I wasn't aware of this site, but it appears to be a place where you can upload video, share it with others, edit together your own and other segments, and publish videos for public consumption. All uploaded content can be downloaded.
Seattle site Trusera, a forum for exchanging health and wellness info, shuts down 27-May-2009: If you created a blog or used the site in some other fashion, the company already offers an RSS export feature that you can use to extract your data.
Yahoo says its shutting down the hoary Geocities "later this year": Geocities was an early Web hosting site that allowed its members to create truly horrible, horrible designs that by today's standards would cause your eyeballs to melt out of their sockets. Honestly, the sites were ugly even in the mid-1990s. Yahoo bought Geocities 10 years ago for the hilarious sum of $4.6 billion (largely stock, as I recall). The site, which offers free hosting, still sees 12 million unique visitors per month.
Later this year, Yahoo will provide more migration details before it shuts everything down for good. Yahoo has paid hosting options ($5/month for 12 months, then $10/month), including a domain name, email, and so forth.
Yahoo's hosted services offer unlimited disk space, data transfer, and email storage, but the boys and girls at Yahoo like to define unlimited to mean whatever they want it to mean, something that's gotten other companies (like Verizon) in trouble before. Read this bit of nonsense:
"If you use your services consistently with the Terms of Service and these paragraphs, your site can grow as large as necessary to meet your small business needs, but to ensure a great experience for all, we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, but our abuse controls may cause a brief delay while we evaluate if expansion is appropriate."
Which means, "We have rules, which we're not telling you, because we think you'll game the system, because we don't trust you, and we're the adults, and even though we don't tell you the rules, we're judging by these secret rules while pretending that 'unlimited' means 'whatever amount we decide secretly you deserve.'"
After Kodak's announcement that without a purchase, pictures go boom, Shutterfly restates its intent: Shutterfly has no minimum yearly purchase (or ever) to keep accounts active, and archives photos at full resolution.
Apple slams door on HomePage on 7-July-2009: The Web-based page-building tools in MobileMe (the service formerly known as .Mac) will be removed. Any published Web pages will remain in place. However, pages can't be edited or deleted. Which means that if you don't want a permanent archive of a page about your cat that you posted 4 years ago in a fit of sleeplessness, now is the time to remove it. Apple no longer offers a Web-based site building tool, but the firm sells iWeb for Mac OS X for creating simple and rich media sites and blogs.
Apple is also killing Groups on 7-July, as was previously known: Groups was a way to share content among several people who would be granted pooled storage as well as a group email list. Content will be shunted to a Groups folder in the group creator's MobileMe iDisk labeled "Groups Archive". Groups features will simply stop working on that date.
Rare good news from your faithful daethwatcher: FileFront was acquired by its original developers from Ziff Davis, averting the shutdown and deletion of terabytes of user gaming-related data last week.
Microsoft will shut down Encarta information Web sites: I don't believe any user data will be lost, just the encyclopedia content that Microsoft once thought would be one key line of business outside of applications and operating systems. Much like, well, many things Microsoft thought would be key lines of business outside of...
Ziff-Davis is abruptly shuttering FileFront, a site for gaming patches, user-generated levels, and related content: With five days' warning, ZD is already dismantling this massive, high-traffic collection of gaming content. It's a very strange move, guaranteed to piss off gamers for all eternity. An effort has been underway since the announcement to download and migrate content. One user reports 48 terabytes (TB) of data were stored at FileFront. [link via Bruno. Thanks!]
Recent Comments