Graveyard of failed social media, blogging, and online interactive communities.
I have been online since 1998. I have watched many sites come and go often leaving their users stranded and in distress.
Today when they announced Yahoo bought Tumblr, I wondered, will Yahoo be one in a long list of big companies who ruin a good thing once they buy it? Often times when these companies get sold and eaten up by the big guys, they die a quick death later. Here is my list for the graveyard of closed and failed social media, blogging, interactive sites in the last 10 years. Let’s take a look.
2/15 Added to the list, Google Glasses! Officially closed down. Good article here in the NYT.
Vox- a blogging website community.
Vox was an Internet blogging service run by Six Apart. The site ran from October 26, 2006 to September 30, 2010. Vox was a blogging site that was very loved and closed.
Clients came to me needing a website as soon as they announced the shutdown.
MobileMe-Apple offered people a place to build and run a free website. (formerly .Mac and iTools) , MobileMe: July 9, 2008 – June 30, 2012, was a subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. All services were being gradually transitioned and replaced by iCloud . The service ceased as of June 30, 2012, with transfers to iCloud available until July 31, 2012. Afterwards, all data was deleted, and the email addresses of accounts not transferred to iCloud were marked as unused.
I had clients in a panic who needed a website after this shut them down.
Some sites that are gone, and some are still up but basically dying or dead and might as well be in the Graveyard.
Bebo: AOL bought Bebo from it’s founders in 2008 for 850 million. This was later considered one of the worst deals ever. AOL announced plans shut down or sell Bebo on June 16, 2010. The property was sold to Criterion Capital Partners for an undisclosed amount, believed to be around $10 million. (Ouch!) In December 2010, AIM eliminated access to AOL chat rooms noting a marked decline of patronage in recent months.
Bebo today: In May 2013, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. I would have to say, if you are a Bebo user, it may be time to plan your exit.
Del.icio.us: Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.The site was sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011 and relaunched in a “back to beta” state on September 27 that year.
Recently they did another redesign and launch in Jan 2013, with more of a facebook type interface, but it would appear to little to late. Core users are fed up and you can find many negative comments about how cumbersome and bloated this bookmarking service is now.
itunes ping by apple
eons, social media site for older people
diasporia-app based social media network
Orkut-social media-still technically alive, yet dead.
Xanga-social media
Friendster-before Facebook
Digg-failing now
myspace-lost to facebook and lost it’s base. Too many ads , spam and clutter.
mylife-dead
Yahoo! Buzz
iYomu based in New Zealand
Google really owns it’s own private graveyard.
Pinterest created a Google product graveyard. View here.
Let’s envision the google car driving and filming these departed ideas and some near death now, as we visit the Google Graveyard.
igoogle, will be closed in Nov 2013. So many people use this as their start/homepage including me and there is really nothing else like it.
I will be doing some research and trying to find a replacement and will be blogging about it before the Nov 2013 closure.
Google Reader* If you are actively using Feedburner, I think it’s time to start taking full possession of your feeds again (which isn’t easy). RSS may still be the plumbing that makes a lot of applications tick, but don’t look for Google to provide a platform for RSS much longer. Read more from this article on techcrunch here and for another good article on this situation click here:
Adsense for feeds
Google Video
Piknic, the popular photo editing service that it purchased in 2010.
Buzz
Google Labs
Google Health
Google Power Meter
Knol, the company’s attempt to recreate Wikipedia in its own ad-supported image.
Aardvark
Desktop
Fast Flip
Maps API for Flash
Google Pack
Google Web Security
Image Labeler
Notebook
Sidewik
Subscribed Links
Google Code Search
Jaiku
University Research Program for Google Search
Slide
a social software company acquired for $228 million in August, 2010.
2/2015 Google Glasses
Google Bookmarks Lists,
Google Friend Connect
Google Gears
Google Search Timeline
Google Wave
Google Listen
Google Lively
Google Postini Services, (omg, lol, I forgot all about postini!)
Google Fastflip
Google bought a really cool program called “Bumptop” in 2010, and promptly killed it.
You could turn your desktop into a totally customized 3D room with folders in piles, and you just dragged and dropped everything or touchpad,
It was really fun.
If you want to see how cool it was , watch the TED video here.
Google also abandoned the Google Toolbar for Firefox, after unceremoniously discontinuing several APIs the previous month, including APIs for Code Search, Diacritize, Feedburner, Finance, PowerMeter, Sidewiki, and Wave. In addition, the company discontinued its 13-year-old Google Friends newsletter and Google Directory in July 2011.
Now we have PC Magazine and others proclaiming the death of Google Glasses. I can only say , thank heavens for that one!
One of the reasons I do not recommend people get a blog on “blogger, blogspot or google blogs, I am not not sure what the official name is now. I feel like many of their other products, they can just shut this down one day when it makes sense for them to shut it down. Now I do not think that will actually happen because Google is trying to integrate blogger with all your google products. They want Google Plus and everything in one place and to all be connected. To me no professional runs their site on a free blog service. There are many limitations with a free blog. I highly recommend people start one for practice and learning purposes, but once you are ready to really launch your books, products, or professional website, you should have a professionally set up website. For me that means a well done customized WordPress premium theme with all the back end stuff you need done right.
I have converted many blogger sites to WordPress. It is a little tricky but if you know what you are doing you can make it work.
They do have a feature you can find to export your posts.
If you have some other companies I missed, please leave those for me in the comment section. I am sure I missed some good ones.
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