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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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).
Yahoo says its shutting down the hoary Geocities "later this year": Geocities was an early Web hosting site that allowed its members to create truly horrible, horrible designs that by today's standards would cause your eyeballs to melt out of their sockets. Honestly, the sites were ugly even in the mid-1990s. Yahoo bought Geocities 10 years ago for the hilarious sum of $4.6 billion (largely stock, as I recall). The site, which offers free hosting, still sees 12 million unique visitors per month.
Later this year, Yahoo will provide more migration details before it shuts everything down for good. Yahoo has paid hosting options ($5/month for 12 months, then $10/month), including a domain name, email, and so forth.
Yahoo's hosted services offer unlimited disk space, data transfer, and email storage, but the boys and girls at Yahoo like to define unlimited to mean whatever they want it to mean, something that's gotten other companies (like Verizon) in trouble before. Read this bit of nonsense:
"If you use your services consistently with the Terms of Service and these paragraphs, your site can grow as large as necessary to meet your small business needs, but to ensure a great experience for all, we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, but our abuse controls may cause a brief delay while we evaluate if expansion is appropriate."
Which means, "We have rules, which we're not telling you, because we think you'll game the system, because we don't trust you, and we're the adults, and even though we don't tell you the rules, we're judging by these secret rules while pretending that 'unlimited' means 'whatever amount we decide secretly you deserve.'"
Apple slams door on HomePage on 7-July-2009: The Web-based page-building tools in MobileMe (the service formerly known as .Mac) will be removed. Any published Web pages will remain in place. However, pages can't be edited or deleted. Which means that if you don't want a permanent archive of a page about your cat that you posted 4 years ago in a fit of sleeplessness, now is the time to remove it. Apple no longer offers a Web-based site building tool, but the firm sells iWeb for Mac OS X for creating simple and rich media sites and blogs.
Apple is also killing Groups on 7-July, as was previously known: Groups was a way to share content among several people who would be granted pooled storage as well as a group email list. Content will be shunted to a Groups folder in the group creator's MobileMe iDisk labeled "Groups Archive". Groups features will simply stop working on that date.
The 10-year-old Yahoo Briefcase service will close: With 30 MB of storage in up to 5 MB chunks, IDG News Service notes, it's a pretty old-school operation.
Briefcase users have until 30-March-2009 to clear out their luggage.
Jason Scott is pretty angry about the cavalier way in which AOL, among others, is shutting things down: My friend Chris Pepper forward a link to the Slashdot discussion of Scott's article in which he argues that some kind of eviction bill of rights is needed for digitally hosted material.
