With so many URL shortening services out there, this was bound to happen to at least one of them: Trim is shutting down. According to a blog post by parent company Nambu Networks, it was an expensive and fruitless effort.
"We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential," the post read.
Those expenses may have been particularly encumbering recently, when the service, found at Tr.im, was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week that knocked it offline.
The blog post was tinged with more than a hint of bitterness. Twitter, the service that led to the explosion of URL shorteners as Web users needed to truncate lengthy addresses to fit into a 140-character space, has shown a clear preference for Trim rival Bitly. Twitter uses Bitly as its default URL shortener, and it's even been rumored that Twitter may acquire it altogether.
"Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double down and develop Tr.im further," the post read. "What is the point? With Bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, Tr.im will lose over (in) the long run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future."
What the company hasn't said: what will happen to existing Trim URLs? It's likely that Nambu Networks hasn't yet decided. If Trim is completely closed, that would mean that those shortened URLs would turn into broken links. It'd be possible to close it to new entries but keep existing ones, except that wouldn't solve the financial problem.
One commenter on the Trim blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project. But for now, its fate remains up in the air.
My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.
(Credit: Yahoo)File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.
An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."
Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.
But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.
This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Apple's MobileMe suite of Web services suffered another outage Monday that affected an unknown number of its users.
Of the included services, Mail was inaccessible for approximately two hours. Earlier in the day we had received scattered reports from users who were unable to access their mail. Those reports were later confirmed both through Apple's MobileMe status ticker and Twitter's real-time search tool. For those affected, all other aspects of MobileMe were reportedly up and running.
Monday's problems centered on a lack of access to Mail on three fronts: through the Web, on the iPhone, and on IMAP for use on desktop e-mail applications. The same thing happened in mid July, with enough blowback to cause Apple to offer a 30-day extension to both free trial and paying users.
Despite the known outage, there hasn't been an update to the MobileMe Status Blog since July 29. The blog was provisioned specifically to address any known issues with the service. For now, most of the chatter has been on Apple's support discussions with dozens of threads from users frustrated by the lack of communication and lost productivity.
As a reminder, if you're a MobileMe subscriber with continuing issues, Apple has a special customer service chat tool for you access.
Related: Gmail is down, Twitter sizzling with the news
Update: corrected customer service chat reference from a call-in service.
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.
SAN FRANCISCO--A power outage hit downtown San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, leaving thousands of residents without power and knocking popular Web sites such as Craigslist, GameSpot, Yelp, Technorati, TypePad and Netflix offline for a few hours.
The power failure apparently hit 365 Main, a 227,000-square-foot data center in downtown San Francisco, particularly hard. The data colocation center's client list includes Craigslist and CNET Networks' GameSpot, a sister site of News.com.
It wasn't immediately clear if the other affected Web sites were customers of 365 Main or of other Web hosting companies, or whether the sites were blacked out for all visitors.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
At 4 p.m. PDT in an e-mailed statement, Miles Kelly, 365 Main's vice president of marketing, had this to say: "At 1:45 pm today, there was a major power event in San Francisco that impacted business operations for many San Francisco based companies, including 365 Main's San Francisco data center. PG&E has not yet determined the cause of the failure. Some customers within the 365 Main facility were temporarily effected by the utility failure. The building is currently 100 percent operational and running on back-up power (generators) until the company can confirm that utility power is stable."
Most sites seemed to be working again by 4:45 p.m. What this means for 365 Main's service agreements with its customers, which promises 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year power, is still unclear. We're waiting to hear more from 365 Main. In an ironic note, a press release from 365 Main dated Tuesday noted the company had provided Red Envelope "two years of continuous uptime."
Update 5:00 p.m.: Asked why the data center company, which bills itself as "the world's finest data centers," failed to meet its standard of ensuring service to customers even in the event of a power failure, Kelly said "I don't know."
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific Gas & Electric said that more than 30,000 of its customers lost power after an explosion under a manhole cover on Mission Street.
A man exits the main entrance of 365 Main on Tuesday.
(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET News.com)Contrary to prior reports, there was no mob of angry customers outside the 365 Main building, and no drunk employee had gone on a rampage, according to Kelly. The "mob" was actually a line of customers who were forced to enter through the front door and have badges checked manually to get into the building because the parking garage gate was affected by the power outage, according to Chris Hutchens, a network engineer at SF Data, which is a customer of 365 Main.
Update July 25, 9 a.m.: Kelly released some more details of went wrong at the San Francisco data center. While they still don't know all the answers, here's what they're saying now:
--Power was restored at 2:34 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, after a 45-minute outage at 365 Main. At least three of the eight colocation rooms were affected, and possibly more.
--So far it is estimating that the power failure impacted 20 to 40 percent of its San Francisco customers.
--The company is still investigating why parts of the back-up generator system failed during Tuesday's power surge.
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