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.
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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.
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!)
The Furl social-bookmarking site has been sucked into Diigo.com: The Furl service is no longer avaialble, but bookmarks can be transferred directly into Diigo.com.
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.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land rounds up Google's slaughter of the services: He writes, Google's changes include "an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor."
As noted earlier in this blog, Google has already shut some services down like Lively (a 3D world with avatars) and JotSpot (which was migrated into Google's wiki service, but with some features dropped, like class reunions).
Sullivan has run down the Google blog entries that detail the changes, so I'm cribbing from his work here, and annotating with my own take.
Google Video: Upload will no longer be allowed in the near future; videos that have been uploaded will remain. The service will be refocused on search instead of sharing. Google bought YouTube for a reason.
Google Catalog: This move has little impact on regular users, because it wasn't a hosted offering. Google Catalog was an effort to turn print catalogs via OCR into online searchable listings.
Google Notebook: The service allowed you to annotate Google search results by linking and creating notes. Google has various offerings that replicate but don't fully replace this offering, which obviously didn't have enough uptake to develop. The service won't stop working for those using it, but no one can newly sign up for Notebook, nor will development proceed.
Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor: Jaiku was a Twitter-like service for creating communication among friends; the project will move to a different platform (Google App Engine), and volunteers will maintain the code, which will be released as open source. Dodgeball was an SMS-based notification service for informing friends of your whereabouts, among other social lubrication. Mashup Editor let you create applications from simple pieces, but it's also migrating to the App Engine architecture for good reason.
Google is getting serious by reducing the number of projects in the works, and teaching people that beta isn't just the second letter in the Greek alphabet.
The New York Times is dumping its internal Times File bookmarking feature: Times File allowed logged-in users to save a bookmark on the Times site for a given story. The feature will be removed from the site on 21-January-2009, but the ability to store a bookmark will disappeared from stories on 22-December-2008. The landing page currently doesn't explain the feature's upcoming trip to cold storage (the morgue is a newspaper's name for its filing system of old information) at this writing.
The Times said in its email announcement that social bookmarking sites can do the heavy lifting, and they can devote resources elsewhere.
The feature relied on software from LookSmart, which is offering a nifty transfer mechanism.
Condé Nast shuts down its social-networking site Flip.com: Fishbowl NY passes along email Flip sent to its users that informs them that to save the scrapbooking projects they've created (flipbooks, of course), they might want to print them. Perhaps with a letterpress, just for extra irony?
My wife groaned when I read her the "Flip Flops" headline, but pointed out, what else could I write? Flip Out?
