November 2008 Archives

Amazon's Alexa Web Search allowed developers to build search engines from cached pages: Alexa is a combination of site traffic and search engine, designed originally (by Brewster Kahle) as a means of archiving the Web in a different way from the Internet Archive, a parallel and independent non-profit operation. Alexa Web Search allowed developers to use Alexa's cache to build custom search engine results. It wasn't used much, apparently.

No new users are being accepted as of yesterday (26-November-2008); the use of Alexa Web Search goes away on 26-January-2009. [link via John Cook at TechFlash]

It's come to this already! Someone I know is shutting his company's doors: Rael Dornfest, once an O'Reilly man about town and conference organizer, and fine, fine fellow, has sold the intellectual property of his firm Values of n to Twitter, and will be joining them as an employee.

Values of n ran two Web applications for reminders and notes: I Want Sandy and Stikkit. I Want Sandy was a reminder service where you could have the eponymous Sandy send you email, SMS, Tweets (via Twitter), and other forms of communication for reminders. Stikkit was a somewhat intelligent sticky note Web app that let you enter freeform and lightly structured data to keep track of stuff without having to launch separate contact/notes/calendar/email programs to pull it together.

Rael, a quintessentially good guy in my experience with him, noted in the farewell post that both services have a variety of ways to export data; that Stikkit has a full API that can pull out more information; and they're providing even more tools for export before they shut down.

Sandy won't live here any more and Stikkit will have a fork in it on 8-December-2008.

Google's Lively will be quite inert, quite soon: The virtual-reality world faces reality, as despite some interest, Google pulls the plug. On 31-December-2008, Lively.com goes dead. Google's shutdown page notes, "Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms." There's no universal VR interchange format into which you can export objects and spaces--or at least not one that Google supports.

I know, I know, this is about hosted stuff not people, but Jerry Yang's expiration date as CEO is nearing. He'll step down when they find a replacement, which he'll be involved in selecting. Which is a bad idea. If you can't run the company well yourself, being involved in finding the next leader is comical.

I used to email with Jerry a bit way way back in the long ago, when YAHOO still had its abbreviation spelled out. Nice guy. But not Steve Ballmer.

I've been trying to think why the growing number of hosted service shutdowns has affected me so viscerally. I expect it's because some percentage of customers of these services will not find about the imminent demise of their data until it's too late.

A good friend of mine had a chunk of her life in a storage locker in the Seattle area. She went to get something out of the locker and found the lock changed--and discovered that all the contents had been auctioned off as abandoned. I can't recall the precise details: a check had bounced? a letter had gone missing? The storage firm said they'd done all the right things, although obviously hadn't.

That's the way this feels. It's as if a storage center had said, "We're going out of business, and we'll be setting the contents of our building on fire. If you get here soon enough, you might be able to pull some stuff out of the blaze. And, by the way, we've taken the liberty of removing all the tags from your boxes, and your CDs from their cases."

Perhaps this may be a requirement after we reach the bottom of this downturn and climb our way up: that hosted service and storage firms may need to develop plans for their demise that are funded through a trust or escrow arrangement.

The next time someone says your data is safe with them because they use 1024-bit encryption and retinal scans of all employees, you might ask: what happens when you die?

Digital Railroad's abrupt inability to continue operations sparked the creation of ItDied.com: Digital Railroad will likely be cited for years to come as the first in what is likely a wave of service shutdowns by startup firms that leave users hanging. This is no fault of Digital Railroad's (or so I believe with the facts I have right now).

Startup firms rely on their investors' continued interest, and boards are often dominated by venture capitalists and others who might choose to pull the plug for their own reasons, as they have no specific relationship with a company's downstream clientele.

Digital Railroad, a stock photography site that let professional photographers manage their own inventory and sales, had said it was shedding costs in mid-October, but posted a note on 28-October-2008 that the plug would be pulled within 24 hours. A competing firm, PhotoShelter, put in place a plan that helped move some number of photographers' images and other data over. Digital Railroad believes the files will remain intact on servers that are no longer active, and if assets are purchased, photographers may be able to get more data back in the future.

What Digital Railroad's photographers lost is not their images; I can't imagine any pro not having many backups of whatever they uploaded. Rather, the time invested in coding their images to the company's specifications--the metadata. Some photographers reported having spent hundreds of hours on this task. It's unclear, but that metadata is likely lost or unusable.

Google gives up on JotSpot's servers, but not all customers: Google ostensibly bought JotSpot for its advanced, easy-to-use, template-based wiki hosting. Apparently, the uniqueness of JotSpot was too much for the company, which is offering free migration of most sites into Google Sites--with reduced functionality, of course. No scripts, forms, plug-ins, or page-specific permission. Just...fabulous.

JotSpot's servers will be shut down on 15-January-2009. Migrate before then.

Google has a migration form, but notes that you have to create a Google Sites site first that's empty, and then migrate your JotSpot wiki into it. But Google is also offering export options to preserve as much as one might to take a site elsewhere. Given that most wikis are highly particular, it's possible this is very little comfort. Still, I'll take it.

Those who devoted time and effort to building JotSpot Family Site or Class Reunion Site pages are simply out of luck. There's no migration option and little suggestion about any help.

JotSpot abandoning these two categories entirely just shows how risky it can be to use tools that are site-specific: so much metadata, so much uploading, so much content creation is simply lost when companies lose interest or shrink their businesses.

TechCrunch reports that AOL will shut-down its user-contributed video site, AOL Video Uploads: Michael Arrington writes that those with uploaded content will have until 18-December-2008 to move videos elsewhere. The company will recommend Motionbox, which will have an optimized transfer process.

Xdrive: AOL was pretty excited three years ago when it acquired online storage firm Xdrive. So excited, that they created an option to have a free account with up to 5 GB of storage. No more.

AOL announced a few weeks ago, as part of shuttering of various divisions, that Xdrive would shut down and delete all files on 12-January-2009.

New files cannot be uploaded at this point, either. Billing halted 5-November-2008 for any paid customers.

The site provides a FAQ on what you might need to know. They aren't offering a DVD-burning option, which would have been rather convenient for those who might be storing gigabytes of data. Still, it's an orderly shutdown.

The FAQ lists several options for other backup and storage services. But they omit two you might consider:

Amazon S3: S3 is pure storage. Prices start at 15 cents per GB per month for storage and 17 cents per GB for data transfer out (from Amazon to elsewhere); tiers for usage in the multi-terabyte range drop costs. Inbound transfers are a flat 10 cents per GB. Some backup services rely on S3 on the backend, such as JungleDisk. If you were to store 50 GB, you would pay $7.50 per month for the privilege, not including the cost of moving it in, or outbound usage.

Amazon offers no interface for its distributed storage system, just an API, but there are plenty of clients that handle it, including Jollat (Java-based for most platforms) and Interarchy (a Mac OS X FTP and file-transfer manager). Several Firefox plug-ins provide full functionality as well.

Apple's MobileMe: While MobileMe is pitched as an email address, a sync service for desktop and iPhone/iPod touch information, and a Web/video gallery, it also comes with 20 GB of storage (which you can divide in any proportion between email and plain storage), and 200 GB of included monthly data transfer for $99/year. Storage and transfer rates can be increase to 40 GB storage/400 GB transfer for an extra $49/year; 60 GB/600 GB is an extra $99/year. That works out to $8.25/month, $12.33/month, and $16.50/month for 20, 40, and 60 GB, respectively. Not a bad price if you can make use of any of the additional features.

Mac OS X users get built-in support for what Apple calls its iDisk through a desktop shortcut. On other platforms, standard WebDAV clients work--Windows XP and Vista have native WebDAV clients that you use a wizard to set up a desktop icon for.

Every day, another hosted service dies. Hosting isn't new technology: The commercial Internet started when service providers, existing and newcomers, began offering ways for other companies to make material available without building infrastructure in house. The growth of Web 2.0 as a basic site requirement, coupled with cloud this-and-that (cloud computing, cloud services, cloud storage), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) all mean that individuals, institutions, and firms of all sizes find themselves with more resources stored elsewhere that they rely on for personal memories or business operations.

I'm a journalist, and I find myself seeing every more announcements, often abrupt, from companies that run out of funding, as well as from firms like Google and AOL that decide to cut lose ventures that aren't panning out. In some cases, subscribers have hours to move their data; in others, the data is either stored in proprietary structures or ones that can't be exported...or there's no time to move anything. It's gone.

This site is a bit of a public service. I'll put some advertising on to support my time and own costs in operation, but I'm primarily focused on making sure that people who want a one-stop shop to capture the dead pool of Web and Internet services can subscribe to this feed.

Unlike the macabre phrase used throughout the book Carter Beats the Devil about a woman who apparently perished at the hands of a cruel man, "She never died," I'm here to bring you the bad news. It's dead, Jim.

It died.