Music site Social.fm bites the dust
Social.fm, a music site that was known as Mercora until last year, has officially folded.
"We regret to inform you and apologize for this inconvenience, but Social.fm will be shutting down the system on July 31st, 2008," a message on the site read.
The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM.
Despite having raised $5 million in venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners and signing a deal with Microsoft, Social.fm never found its niche. It originally started out as a peer-to-peer Web radio and music search site, and CEO Srivats Sampath once made the dubious claim that his company "beat Steve Jobs to the iPhone" by letting people share music wirelessly through its smartphone-based "M" service.
With its makeover as Social.fm, Mercora cut its subscription fee and focused more on social music. But with significantly larger competitors in the space--Pandora, Last.fm, Imeem, and iLike--Social.fm's traffic tumbled.
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Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
