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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.

Personal timeline mash-up system Swurl is gone: The developers of a system that could take disparate feeds of your life and put them together into a customized illustrated timeline have shut their doors. They note on the Web site, "We built Swurl as two guys doing something we love in our spare time. Unfortunately, due to the pressures of our day jobs and other distractions, we can no longer support or maintain the service at the level that we think our users deserve." Swurl was an aggregator, so ostensibly no user data was lost.

Publications shine their flashlight on It Died: I guess I (and a bunch of sites covering other kinds of shutdowns) struck a nerve. TechFlash wrote up yours truly's efforts, while BusinessWeek.com and All Things D looks at It Died and several other sites.

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.

I don't think that People Connection was originally meant to be a death pool: However, AOL has turned this blog into a relentless drumming of sites and projects they're canceling, including several I was unaware that AOL wrote. There must be a lot of layoffs and shifting around at the firm, given how many sites are shutting down. For instance, Circavie, a personal timeline feature, will erase itself from all four dimensions on 15-January-2009; there's no apparent way to extract timelines you've created. Ficlets, a kind of exquisite corpse for the digital world, will also be shredded on 15-January-2009. One of the People Connection bloggers is still trying to maintain a good attitude, though. Kelly Wilson posts in the middle of the death march of shutdowns, "What's on your plate this Thanksgiving? Share a recipe or your favorite dish!"

The Wall Street Journal notes It Died is part of a growing community of blogs: We're all covering the death of various companies and services. Sad, really.

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]

In a hilarious bit of timing, a site devoted to retail shutdowns and other cyclical behavior launched alongside ItDied: David Wertheimer, who runs the site, wrote in to note the odd coincidence. His site, Timely Demise, has a similarly dark-humor title as mine, and tracks "changes in the U.S. retail landscape." Huh, is a growth industry in blogs reporting on the collapse of sectors of the economy?