Conde Nast to shutter teen site Flip.com
Conde Nast is throwing in the towel on Flip.com.
The teen girl social-networking site, which launched in February 2007, will shut down on December 16, according to an e-mail sent to users Tuesday. Members who used the service to create scrapbooks were advised: "any flipbooks that you would like to save before this date, we suggest you print them," according to MediaBistro.
Flip.com, which reached a membership of about 300,000, originally focused on shared "flipbooks" that members could create using photos, videos, and other content. However, the site had difficulty competing with the likes of MySpace and Facebook, and morphed in January into a set of distributed Web apps designed for existing social networks' developer platforms.
According to MediaWeek, Conde Nast is also closing the message board YM.com, which is what remained of the one-time YM teen girl magazine.
"The idea is that we're encouraging people to go to TeenVogue.com," a representative of Conde Nast's CondeNet told MediaWeek.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven.
