----
1. http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists
2. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
It is always a pity to see such a space disappear.
Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep the thing afloat and their community intact.
Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last: to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the service to open its source code.
[0] http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado
[1] https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...
A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it got.
I enjoy working with it (and I've grown to really enjoy python due to my time using it), and it's possible to build a server that uses generators pretty easily. The only problem is that you have to be really watchful for blocking calls mucking the whole thing up.
For a long time, I really would have rather used node, but now, I'm ok with using python. I pushed us into a micro service style architecture, so one day, it's feasible to upgrade different parts of the stack with different technologies.
Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another example of why making social startups is a huge risk.
I'm currently working on a system, but it requires user input, in order to bypass the limitations of the API.
or the idea behind https://posthaven.com/
I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers. All the people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave you access to a lot of their information. Yet it's so easy to let them down and shut down a service. It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed. Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's always about the money though).
But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.
37 Signals has a healthy business with good revenue building only "sane" products. To compare the two is apples to oranges.
As you said they did A LOT for the friendfeed platform even after it was somewhat decided they would have not mantained anymore, that is not something I want to ignore.
My point is that many services are born and die, some of them die because they weren't building "sane" products. It's a choice, not complaining about that, but I personally prefer when there's a path ahead that won't let the users down because they weren't relying on funding or other things to stay up, but only on the power of their users.
Maybe I'm asking for something impossible? Dunno, but the PostHaven/Basecamp thing is giving me hope :)
It was an inevitability, that the site would shrink, and that FB would either decide it couldn't continue to fund a small community or the handful of employees would decide to depart.
Currently, there are only 3 members of the team working at FB, and I have a feeling a few of them have decided to move on which has precipitated the closure.
Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web service.
