We talked the other day about the closure of Tripod (Web hosting service by Lycos). Well, today we talk about the closure of another one of their services, the e-mail service Lycos mail. In fact both closures were announced by Lycos simultaneously, and Lycos mail will close its doors on 15th February. In an e-mail, users are warned about the need to back up their accounts before that day and not to use their e-mail addresses anymore. This service was much less used than Tripod but it was maybe more important for users.

Yahoo! Briefcase, the online storage service by Yahoo!, will close on March 30th. With a decade on its back, it has become totally obsolete -adapt or perish. The service currently offers 30Mb of storage with a maximum of 5Mb per file. Totally inadequate. Yahoo! has decided not to enter into the competition of this type of services, especially when it is expected the arrival of a Google service (Gdrive), which, if it follows the Gmail strategy, it will offer an outrageously large online storage capacity, a user-friendly interface and integration with its other services. According to Yahoo!, the reason for the closure is that nobody used it. The larger storage capacity offered by Yahoo! Mail accounts and the purchase of Flicker has lead users to use them as storage to the detriment of Briefcase. If someone has something stored in Briefcase, and wants to keep it, then must retrieve it before March 30th.

Lycos Europe, after deciding to finish trading and selling off what they could, they will close several unprofitable services. Amongst these is the pioneering web hosting service Tripod. Lycos announced the decision a few days ago on the service page and by sending e-mails to the users to inform them. The service will be unavailable from the 15th of February. I said this was a pioneering because with Geocities, they were one of the first free web hosting services in existence, a service that polemically bought by Yahoo! in January 2000 for 4.000 million dollars. Tripod was created by two students with the aide of a teacher in 1992 and purchased by Lycos in February 1998. In December last year it registered 17% fewer visits than in 2007. Curiously this month traffic has increased due to the fact that several media and blogs are commenting on the closure.

SpringWidgets is a company dedicated to the creation of Widgets for the web, founded in 2006. It’s a daughter company of Fox Interactive and it is going to close soon. The closure will affect the 15 workers that form the present staff. SpringWidgets developed a widget creation platform that was used by MySpace (property of Fox Interactive since 2007) to insert advertisements. Furthermore, their free widgets were one of the most used platforms by users to generate their own widgets that could be put on blogs and sites. I myself have used them on several occasions, and they were of a great quality. The motive for the closure appears to be a cutback in spending and focusing on more affordable projects. To get the opinion of an expert in the widget market, we have put ourselves in contact with Isabel Sabadí, CEO of Iris Experience, a Spanish company that boasts the widget creation platform Widgadget. This is her opinion about the closure of SpringWidgets: The current economic situation is making large companies think about cutting back on their less productive divisions and getting rid of lines with unstable business models. The closure of the two widget applications (SpringWidgets and Flecktor) on the part of Fox Interactive ...

Jaiku is Twitter’s eternal competition. As you know it was bought by google in October 2007. I always preferred the latter one and I still insist it is better quality, but Twitter has a share of the grand mass, "developments community" and most of all your contacts. These days Google is releasing ballast(my stocks are going up the creek) and, amongst other services, of which we will also speak, Jaiku will close. It’s a half closure, in reality it will close as a service but will enable the latest version in open code for the community. It literally is the “latest version” , because they wont improve or update it, that is up to the developers that wish to so and I think they will, without a shadow of a doubt. When this happens I bet this will be the best  self hosted microblogging platform. This news leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth, its great for the freedom but bad for the closure of the service. I’m sure you will agree with me that Google could have done more for Jaiku. The purchase reminds me of the domain purchases I sometimes do,  following an entrepreneurial impulse that diminishes as time passes. With the financial clout they ...