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.
Recently in Contact, calendar, notes Category
Online database application host Coghead plans shutdown: The firm, which made it relatively simple to build complex applications that they hosted, will cease hosting on 30 April 2009. Coghead was looking for buyers, and found none. Several firms (noted in the linked article) are offering conversion help to their platforms, with some throwing in short-term free hosting.
The Ma.gnolia bookmarking system is unrecoverable: The developers lost both their primary user data storage, and backups were apparently unusable. After three years of operation as a free bookmarking site, akin to Yahoo's Delicious, Ma.gnolia won't be operating any more. The site's owner, Larry Halff, was able to retrieve publicly bookmarked data, and has provided that to users. But private information is gone for good. A recovery effort didn't work.
I Want Sandy creator Rael Dornfest delays shuttering the site by 11 days: There was a large outpouring of anger, disbelief, acceptance, and the other stages of mourning, and Dornfest responded by adding a more extensive export tool for I Want Sandy reminder/scheduling data, and extending the service's operation to 19-December-2008.
Pownce, a mash-up of instant messaging, file-transfer, and Twitter-like features lies down for the great recline on 15-December-2008: The service was intended to make it easier for groups of friends to exchange messages, invitations, pictures, and other communications. It was a great success in getting people to use it, but one expects not on the monetization side.
As appears to be a trend, the founders Ariel Waldman and Mike Malone, are shuttering the service, going to work for another firm (in this case, Six Apart), and selling their Pownce technology to Six Apart as part of the deal. Six Apart is one of two major blog-software and hosting firms, developing Movable Type and hosting TypePad and Vox. (WordPress is the other major pure-play firm in that space.)
This move mirrors the shut down Values of n, a company run by Rael Dornfest, who will turn off its two hosted offerings and take a job with Twitter, bringing along his intellectual property. (See "I Want Sandy and Stikkit Melt Away on 8-December-2008.")
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.
