Webware

A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the home page.

"Thank you for being part of the Wallop beta social-networking site," the message reads. "We really appreciate your feedback and support. The beta period will end on September 18th, 2008--after that date, you will no longer be able to access your account."

But Wallop wasn't just another tale of crushed Silicon Valley dreams. The site, which once aimed to compete with the likes of MySpace, had backing from none other than Microsoft.

Microsoft hadn't invested in Wallop in the traditional sense, but it was Microsoft researchers who built the technology that powered the site and then spun it off as a standalone business.

In 2005, the software giant announced an initiative to license the products of its research labs to select start-ups, one of which was Wallop. It launched Wallop , offering a business model that echoed of virtual-world avatars: you'd pay for modifications to spruce up your profile.

Wallop had also raised a round of Series A venture funding from Bay Partners in 2006.

Obviously, it never really caught on: Wallop was never talked about in the same sentences of even third-tier social networks. As we saw with the demise of Yahoo Mash last month, big-tech backing is by no means a guarantee of success when it comes to social networking.

I may get fired for saying this, but I miss the convenience, focus, and robustness of desktop apps. Sometimes I just want the clarity of a dedicated app--or the isolation; all too often when I'm in a browser, a rogue JavaScript-heavy site will crash not just its own window but the 20 different tabs I have open at that moment.

Building a Site-Specific Browser (SSB) is possible with technologies like Prism from Mozilla, but that doesn't do much for non-developer users. If all you want is an icon to click on your desktop to open a specific URL, and running the site in its own browser isn't what you had in mind, check out two apps: Fluid (download), for OSX, and Bubbles (download) for Windows. Both are free.

With Fluid, you can create as many SSBs as you want, control each of their preferences individually, and let them live where you need them: in the Dock, your desktop, or the Apple Menubar. I especially like the latter because I've created icons for four sites I check on and off during the day. Fluid, which requires Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), also lets you create a single SSB with multiple panes fed from different sites, add a CoverFlow-like preview pane of links leading from the Web app you've desktopized, and will with a bit of Greasemonkey scripting it can alert you via Growl when something changes. Fluid is freeware, says it's creator, Todd Ditchendorf, and will remain so, although he's seeing over 20,000 downloads a month.

Fluid strips the chrome off of your favorite Web sites.

Bubbles for Windows lets you do much the same thing as Fluid. You can update your Windows environment with your latest Web apps as pop-up windows accessible from the system tray. Bubbles' developer, Ohad Eder Pressman, has gone to the trouble of prebuilding extensions for a dozen-plus popular Web apps: Want a Facebook bubble app that refreshes your FB News Feed every 5 minutes, or a Bubble that checks Gmail for you? You're done.

Bubbles' scripts make selected sites look and feel like apps.

Users will always need free-form browsers for exploring the Web, but for their main Web apps, site-specific browsers can do a good job of imitating the local app experience.

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.

Disclaimer: Last.fm is part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.

PodTech, a video podcast network that had taken over $7 million in venture funding, has been sold--and the price may have been a downright embarrassing $500,000.

The news was reported this week by Eric Eldon at VentureBeat, but Valleywag's Jackson West was floating the rumor with less detail last week. And Fake Steve Jobs jumped the gun a little bit by declaring the company dead last October.

The buyer is the Los Angeles-based ViewPartner, a "communications technology company" that seems to only produce Google results about the fact that it bought PodTech. And while no financial specifics were named in the release, VentureBeat reported that the price was around $500,000. Ouch.

PodTech's woes had been very public as high-profile employees started leaving: marketer Jeremiah Owyang, who became an analyst at Forrester; blogger Robert Scoble, essentially the face of the company; and even CEO John Furrier. It was reportedly out of money, despite having raised a $5.5 million venture round and then another $2 million from U.S. Ventures and Venrock.

The rough economy is making it a shaky ride for many start-ups, but PodTech may have suffered from additional problems: the niche of "podcasting" didn't play out the way many expected it to, instead blending into Web video and audio content alongside far more traditional programming. While a few podcasters have become stars, the "top podcast" charts at the iTunes store look a whole lot more like big media: NPR, Comedy Central, and um, the Jonas Brothers.

Not quite up PodTech's alley.

If you've been a longtime Webware reader you might remember a service called Bubble Guru I checked out back in late 2007. It let you create small video pop-ups you could stick on your site to say hi to users, or simply to serve as a more attention-grabbing sticky note. Just launched Bubble Comment is a very similar service, and in fact it's from the same folks. The big difference is that it's completely free, albeit with some limitations.

One of those limitations, for example, is that you can't simply embed Bubble Comment bubbles on any old page or post--you have to specify which page you're linking your friend to, and Bubble Comment will get the recipient, and your video message to the page page with a re-direct. In other words it's not for publishers, but for people to send links to their buddies. Every message expires after 30 days or 25 views--whichever comes first.

If you're looking to send someone a one-off link with a video comment attached it's very cool and completely free. In comparison, parent company kShermanStudios LLC's Bubble Guru requires buying into one of three tiers of service that charges you for how many total messages you want floating around, but offers much more value to blog owners who want to grab your attention in an unusual manner. You just can't help but watch these things, even if the content is lame.

Other products in the bubble family include Bubble Testimonial, which lets you stick video bubbles of consumer testimonials on your product or service pages, along with Bubble Joy, which is a video e-card service.

Stick your ugly mug on pages you send to friends with Bubble Comment.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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."

It might be a bubble if...Perry Farrell is your DJ.

(Credit: Michelle Thatcher/CNET Networks)

The night club was filling up, free drinks were flowing, and Perry Farrell stood behind the DJ table. There was something distinctively bubbly at the TechCrunch/PopSugar "Geek Goes Chic" Meetup in Los Angeles last Thursday, and it wasn't just the personalities of the PopSugar readers.

The party's organizers are only the latest members of the Web scene to bring a little bubble love to Southern California. Social media blogs Mashable and Bub.blicio.us have both hosted LA events in the last month. The move makes sense: Aside from being at the center of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles is one of the fastest growing regions for venture capital [PDF link], and late last year the Los Angeles Times reported that the region had bypassed New England to rank second in the U.S. for tech investment. Plus, the tech community here has been gaining steady momentum since 2006; Tuesday marks the second anniversary of the LA Geek Dinner gatherings.

Still, the impression of froth at the TechCruch/PopSugar meetup was only reinforced by the fact that the most-reported story from the party seemed to be the rumored ejection of representatives of both Mashable and tech-gossip blog Valleywag--complete with debate as to whether the incident was in fact staged to generate buzz. ("If a blogger gets thrown out of a party, but no one cares, does the Internet make a sound?" asks one commenter on the Los Angeles Times story.)

Surely the event's many sponsors can't be happy with the distraction. But it was disappointing that so few exhibitors had anything new to talk about that night. In fact, most of the sponsoring companies were familiar from such past events as Twiistup and Lunch 2.0. The key attention-grabbers seemed to be recently out-of-beta Engage, which helps you connect with potential dates within your existing social network, and last-minute-add ArtistForce, whose reps smartly hung a huge banner to help raise visibility in an otherwise tough corner spot.

Don't get me wrong: I like free beer as much as any other self-respecting journalist. And there's something amusing about throwing a party that's explicitly, if stereotypically, designed to encourage geeky guys and fashionable women to hook up. But the geek/chic idea had its bumps--and grinds, as I discovered. While chatting with friends next to the stage, I was aggressively shoved out of the way by the insistent backside of a dancing attendee. From my vantage point I couldn't tell if it was chic or geek, but either way sometimes the concept is better than the reality.

In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.

About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.

AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.

Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.

AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.

Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.

Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.