Blogger, a Google division, will turn the ability to update a site via FTP/SFTP on 26 March 2010: Blogger has long allowed its users to publish sites using its tools to other servers under the control of users using the ancient FTP and newer secure FTP (SFTP) protocols. (They are not the same thing, but look the same from the outside.)
This let someone use the power of the Blogger system to manage and publish posts without having to have content hosted on Blogger/Google's servers. It's not a surprise it's going away because it's tweaky thing to set up in the first place. Most people who want that kind of functionality would have moved to a self-hosted or ISP-based Movable Type or WordPress installation.
Blogger says that only 0.5 percent of sites use FTP, but that vastly more engineering resources are needed to keep the FTP system working, and that the core technology that supports this publication method will be going away shortly from Google as a whole.
Recently in Consumer Category
Microsoft has closed down its ThumbTack service for bookmarking: The service at Live Labs let you save all manner of things, including links and photos, in a single place for later retrieval or viewing. Because this was a "lab" experiment, nothing was guaranteed. If you go to the ThumbTack site today, it still encourages you to sign up--and directs you to a dead site.
As Geocities sinks slowly into the sea, let us praise great BLINK tags: Buh-bye, Geocities. I'd say we hardly knew ya, but we knew ya all too well.
xkcd, the great Webcomic, offers up a perfect parody (may only be available on 26 October, however).
O happy day, here at itdied.com: The tr.im URL shortener service has opted to stay alive instead of shutdown. Shortcut services have a hard time making money because their job is to stay out of the way. After a flood of "how can we help" messages from users, tr.im's parent firm, Nambu Network, is moving the service into a community-operated mode, details to follow. The company will transfer the domain name, databases, and software, and hopes that it can be run via donations and other means. The CEO of Nambu will pay all expenses out of his pocket until funding can be worked out.
ItLives!
The tr.im URL shortening service has shortened its lifespan: The service will no guarantee redirects for URLs starting 31-Dec-2009, and has disclaimed the reliability of its statistics from this point on.
Tr.im, like other URL shorteners, generates a short unique code that someone can use in place of a full URL. Full URLs often have long sets of words in them for search engine optimization and human readability. These long URLs fall afoul of social media sites which either break these strings funny or, like Twitter, limit text.
It's hard to get money out of URL shortening because there are so many services, and the service performed is non-unique. Many firms have tried to add value to shortening by providing extras, like future redirection (if the destination URL has changed), statistics, and other efforts. I don't know of any that have stuck because it's a marginal utility function.
On the flip side, URL shorteners must be reliable, safe, and fast. The ones that don't meet those criteria wind up being quickly abandoned.
Twitter accelerated the usage of URL shorteners without any commensurate method for those firms to accelerate revenue or revenue potential. Tr.im cried uncle, and is taking its ball and bat elsewhere.
CompuServe Classic finally succumbs: CompuServe was one of the very earliest commercial dial-up bulletin board systems, well known for its "CB radio" chat program, which worked much like IRC. I was a CompuServe user back in 1979, with a 9 digit (70000,0000 format) ID. Exciting, heady days when one stuck a phone handset into an acoustic coupled 110-baud modem connected to your character-based 1 MHz computer.
IF you were still a classic user, you can convert your email over.
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.
