As of Friday morning, technology news site Red Herring, widget start page service Pageflakes, and social bookmarking site Magnolia were all unavailable. But it appears all three will be back up and running.
Eventually.
As for Red Herring's outage, Silicon Valley Insider is reporting (via a Tweet from a former RH employee) that it's closing its doors. However, a source close to the company tell us that Red Herring simply has not paid its hosting bill, and that no employees have been informed otherwise.
In Pageflakes' case the site began experiencing problems early Thursday, which coincided with several other sites from parent company LiveUniverse going down. These sites, including LiveVideo, MeeVee, and Revver are all currently offline (which in Revver's case appears to happen a lot).
We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has "lots of servers." Greenspan also said that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.
For Magnolia, the prognosis is a little more grim. Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out. In the meantime, the service has shuttered its Web front-end and closed external access to its APIs while its database is re-organized. It should be noted, however, that the outage does not affect development on the company's open-sourced project, "M2" which opens up the site for other people to add new features and fix bugs.
The one positive thing to come out of this is learning about the execution of downtime. Magnolia was the only one of these three sites (or more if you're counting Revver and LiveVideo) that put up a notice to its users to tell them what was going on. In many cases, this keeps panic at a low, and more importantly--does not make people think you're shutting down and taking their data or content with you. There is of course a third way to do it if you are actually running out of money: hibernate.
CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.
Revver, a YouTube competitor that made a name for itself by paying video producers, has fallen on hard times.
The company's staff has dwindled to less than half the size it was 18 months ago, according to former employees. Rumors flitter around the Web about whether the company is running out of money. Now comes word that Revver has been trying to sell itself at a fire-sale price for months, according to three sources close to the company.
Revver's asking price is between $300,000 and $500,000, as well as the assumption of the company's debt, which is in the $1 million range, said two sources with knowledge of the negotiations. The sum is tiny considering that the Los Angeles-based Revver raised $12.7 million in venture funding.
The blog Contentinople reported last month that LiveUniverse, a network of entertainment Web sites owned by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, had agreed to acquire the site.
The deal never materialized. A source with knowledge of the negotiations said talks stalled when Greenspan began "trying to drive down the price" and "that Revver's debt was an issue."
In response to questions from CNET News.com, Angela Gyetvan, Revver's vice president of marketing, said: "I'm not at liberty to discuss any of this with you. I can't comment."
Mark Elfenbein, LiveUniverse's chief operating officer also declined to comment.
Revver gained some notoriety in 2006 when video-sharing became a worldwide craze. YouTube dominated the sector but Revver tried carving out a niche by catering to videographers.
The company, backed by such investors as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, and William Randolph Hearst III, offered to share advertising revenue with makers of the most popular clips. The thinking at the company was that if Revver could win over the best creators, audiences would follow.
That's not what happened. Revver has yet to draw an audience big enough to make it one of the leading video-sharing sites. What it has done well is attract a small but talented group of video producers, the sources said.
"Their (producer) community is loyal to them," said one of the sources. "Otherwise, I don't know that they are worth much."
This is not the first time that Revver has entertained potential buyers. A year ago, News.com reported that representatives from Microsoft's video-sharing site Soapbox had toured Revver's offices on Sunset Boulevard. A source said at the time that Microsoft didn't appear to be interested.
Revver, a video-sharing site trudging along in YouTube's shadow, announced Wednesday that the company paid $1 million to videographers over the past year.
Los Angeles-based Revver, among the first Web sites to share advertising revenue with video creators, paid the money to 25,000 people, the company said in a press release.
Because Revver splits ad money with creators, 50-50, Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch figured that the company makes around $2 million to $2.5 million from advertisers.
He also suggested that the figure could be lower if Revver pays more to high-end video makers.
Lycos Mix is a new video-playlist creation tool that lets you string together video clips from various hosting services. The videos sit beside a live chat window based off of Lycos' Cinema technology. Casual observers can come in, watch videos, and chat with you. It's almost like a bar except a little creepier.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
When you're done adding content, which is done by pasting URLs or using the Lycos Mix bookmarklet from the content's source page, you can watch, rearrange, or chat about the videos, all within the same screen. The adding process is a little arduous, as sites such as iFilm, Viddler, and Revver aren't (yet) compliant. Even worse, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox my botched video embed code couldn't be removed from the Lycos Mix submission box. I had to back out of the uploading form and go back in to clear it out. I seriously doubt the casual user is going to have patience for that.
Video-playlist creation has been done before and by many other companies. Most recently SplashCast and Feedbeat. The chat feature is neat, but 9 times out of 10, I'm watching a video because I've received a link to it via e-mail or from a friend's IM. Nearly all video services have comments now, which serve as a permanent forum for conversation. In that sense, I just don't see a need for live chat integration.
See also YouTube's TestTube.
SplashCast, launched today at Demo 07, is a free service that allows users to combine all sorts of media into one master playlist. That playlist can then be embedded on Web sites and blogs or sent directly to friends and family with a simple URL. It's basically the online equivalent of a mix tape. It's similar to YouTube's playlist maker, but with SplashCast, you can also throw pictures, text, and audio into the mix.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
What's really cool about SplashCast is that your already-shared media doesn't need to be uploaded again. Pulling videos or pictures from hosting sites such as YouTube, Revver, or Flickr requires no upload--you simply link your content, and SplashCast will get it for you. SplashCast can pull pictures from Flickr with just a username. You can also give it the tags, and it will pull out specific pictures.
SplashCast offers some advanced functionality for power users. You can choose slide show transition speeds, set the size of the embedded player, and even record your own voiceovers on top of the media. You can also add RSS feeds to any of your three channels, which will pull media from the source without you having to manually add it.
SplashCast is a really cool media-sharing tool. It requires no software, and the interface and its simplicity make it easy to add various types of content for sharing. When faced with a page of multiple embedded players for music, video, and pictures (I'm looking at you, MySpace), SplashCast provides a much smaller footprint for valuable screen real estate.
My first run-in with Spymac was a completely accidental encounter a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a site that had its own visual style and appeal. It pulled in some design cues from Apple but kept its own sense of personality. This week Spymac has relaunched itself as Leapfrog, a portal for user-generated media.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
The old Spymac featured a variety of user services, including e-mail, blogs, and user forums. It was a community-driven site. The new Spymac Leapfrog is all about media. Think YouTube with Google's pastel color palete. Users can browse popular videos, pictures, and music, all through a Flash-based player. Like Viddler, which we covered last month, Spymac lets you plug in your Webcam to record and share your own videos. There's even a revenue-sharing model for user-generated content, similar to Revver.
What's strange to see is that a few of the old Spymac features haven't weathered the transition. The older version of Spymac is now referred to as "Spymac Classic." Services like e-mail, forums, and blogs take you back to the classic version. Likewise, clicking on "galleries" in the classic Spymac pages transports you to the new front page. The two sections feel like completely different sites.
When I look at the evolution of Spymac, I wonder about the rationale. In many ways, it appears they're trying to compete with YouTube and other Flash-video hosting services on a design level. What puzzles me is why they'd completely revamp Spymac to be such a non-Mac site. If anything, I would like to see them focus on integrating the rest of their niche Mac community services to give the site a more cohesive feel in a manner that competitors like YouTube and MySpace haven't been able to accomplish.
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