Brijit.com, an aggregation site that summed online news stories and other content up in 100 words or fewer for quick consumption, has shut its doors.
The shutdown is ideally temporary, the site's management said Thursday, but a placeholder on the front page admitted that Brijit "is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words."
A post on Brijit's blog by CEO and Editor In Chief Jeremy Brosowsky explained further. "As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don't."
Brijit, founded less than a year ago, had been funded solely by angel investments.
Currently, the site has kept its archive of about 16,000 abstracts live but is not accepting new ones. Brijit also compensated its abstract writers with a cut of ad revenue, and said payments for abstracts written up until the site's shutdown would be sent to writers next week.
(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)
It's not like Pets.com closing its doors or anything, but here's another small sign that we could be nearing the beginning of the end of Bubble 2.0: Mowser.com, a start-up that "translates" Web sites into mobile-friendly versions, is dying a quiet death.
Granted, it wasn't a particularly hyped dot-com. But I'm guessing that more than a few start-ups will be commiserating soon.
"We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site, growth has been flat or falling for the past couple months because of various search-engine tweaks I've done," founder and former Yahoo mobile strategist Russell Beattie related in a blog post. "We'll keep the site running for the time being, but we're going to encourage others to not rely on the service as it could disappear in the future."
Trouble raising venture capital? Search-engine optimization strategy not working out? Sounds like what the irrational-exuberance crowd has been talking about.
The real problem is that Mowser fit right into a niche that is likely disappearing. Here's the thing: the last year has seen a trend toward narrowing the gap between the desktop Web and the mobile Web. A bizarre hardware company called Apple released this cute little device called the "iPhone" that a couple of people bought, and one of the cool features on it is that you can browse Web sites more or less just as they appear on a regular computer. There are still plenty of people out there with far less advanced mobile phones, but many of them still aren't browsing the mobile Web in the first place.
Beattie seemed to get the point. "I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time," he wrote. The presence of a separate "mobile Web," he said, is "limited at best, and dying at worst." He probably has the right idea. Other start-ups focusing on mobile Web sites might want to take note.
Beattie also acknowledged the inevitable: "Yes, this means I have to find a real job again."
Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.
But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was probably getting beat up on a playground somewhere. You could create a profile, talk with other members in chat rooms and message boards (this was the pre-webcam era), and engage in other forms of 1998-vintage "interactivity," like online quizzes and polls.
Bolt circa 2001, thanks to the Internet Archive.
(Credit: The Internet Archive)I was a teen in the '90s and had a Bolt profile out of curiosity, but those were the days when Internet social networking was still a very restricted phenomenon for a number of reasons: first, it was still seen as "weird" (and from parents' perspectives, dangerous) for teenagers to be socializing online rather than in real life; and second, AOL was still a juggernaut in those days. Its chat rooms and message boards, not to mention Instant Messenger, were the go-to place for kids who didn't feel like doing their homework. Then there was the fact that chatting and message board posting was, thanks to the limitations of dial-up connections, more or less all you could do. The infectious draw of viral videos and streaming music was still out of reach for many.
The critical mass wasn't there, so there was no real bandwagon effect to help Bolt grow. Then MySpace came along with its originally music-focused model--if My Chemical Romance has a social networking profile, it can't be just for losers, right?--and online social networking lost much of its "a/s/l?" stigma (that's "age/sex/location," one of the Web's oldest pickup lines, for you newbies). Bolt probably could've found some way to "evolve" and get the word out, but it didn't--the video-site makeover flopped amid the current glut of YouTube clones.
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