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 15^th 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 has surprised a lot of the sector given that, above all, the SpringWidget platform was one of the best, technologically speaking. There is speculation about the integration of the applications with MySpace (also property of Fox Interactive).

Clearspring has also announced a 20% reduction in its workforce.

The widget sector, like many others, see themselves threatened by a lack of liquidity and budget cutbacks by the companies. Even so, there is also talk that the companies are going to transfer part of its paper publicity to the online sector in 2009, therefore we hope that as the year progresses the results will look better.

It’s not all bad news. Newsgator will get €10 million in its sixth round, and I believe that soon we’ll see more investment in this sector.

Isabel agrees with me about the high quality of SpringWidget’s technology. From Failbeta, we thank you for your collaboration, and wish Widgadget every success.

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 have always had, their technical capacity to improve it and their influence, they could have made Jaiku the microblogging leader. This clarifies the predictions that point towards Google purchasing Twitter in 2009.

Co.mments is a tracker of our comments on the web, or perhaps we should say, of our conversations. It’s capable of showing all the responses to our comments on various blogs or sites on one single page. It also serves the RSS feeds of these conversations.

It started working nearly three years ago in February 2006. A great service, which just yesterday announced that it will shut its doors January 12. The creator made the announcement by way of an entry on the service’s blog. Although he didn’t give too many details, the reason appeared to be bloody spam, which does so much damage.

It hasn’t taken long for various people to offer to run it; unsurprising, given that it’s a successful service forced to closed just because of spam. We suppose that the creator, before taking this decision, has tried everything. Off the top of my head, integration with the marvellous and efficient Akismet comes to mind.

Before closing, we will be able to export our conversation lists using three formats:  JSON, XML and HTML. There are even services that are still running like Cocomment, which is very similar.

Pownce was launched as a private beta in June 2007 with an excellent backer, Kevin Rose, creator of the social aggregator Digg and Revision3, who created the company Megatechtronium together with a team of developers.

During the private beta, a great deal of expectation was created as it was seen as a potential Twitter killer. Invitations to try it were even sold on eBay. At the beginning of this year, it was opened to the public.

By that date, Jaiku and Twitter already existed. Pownce came to the microblogging market with the functionality of both, and expanded it. It allowed messages with more than 140 characters to be sent, as well as files with images, videos or songs. It launched with two interfaces, the web-based one and another one based on an Adobe AIR desktop application.

Another important difference from its competitors was that, from the beginning, it had a business model. This had two aspects: contextual advertising and premium accounts, which allowed additional features like sending larger files, access to new themes, no advertising, etc.

The service as such will close, but the technology, the know-how and two of the employees will become a part of the company Six Apart, creators of products such as Movable Type or TypePad. The decision to close the service was made by Six Apart after the purchase. The employees are Kevin Rose and Daniel Burk, both from Digg, who will work as advisers.

Users with free accounts, like me, have the option of exporting all of our data to CMSs like Wordpress, while premium users have three options: a refund, a free Vox account or a year of TypePad Plus service.

Has Pownce been a failure? That the service hasn’t worked as expected, and that it’s being closed because of this is a fact, and therefore it is a failure. But since it was purchased by Six Apart only a year ago, we can see it as a success for the creators.

For me, it has been a failure, since the idea (with some differences from Twitter) has not been able to create a large user community that would challenge the leader. Looking at hit numbers, it is easy to imagine that the model wasn’t as profitable as expected.

In the future, we will either see their technology incorporated into the blog platforms of Six Apart, or the creation of a new product. Twitter, although much plainer and simpler (and also not the first), has managed to capture a large user base that finds new features every day, thanks to its powerful API and the community developing around it.

Lycos Europe was founded in 1997 when Lycos signed a joint venture agreement with German group Bertelsmann. Two years later (1999) they opened branches in several cities. In Spain, a delegation was opened that was run by Oscar Sanchez for 4 years, now General Manager for Tech Sales Group.

Bertelsmann group was the content leader in Europe after merging with Lycos - one out of 3 Europeans was a Lycos Europe user. They were overwhelmingly successful and it went public at 24€.

In May 2000, Lycos is bought by Terra Networks (Telefonica) for $12500.

They start buying strategically in Europe. They buy, among others, Swedish ISP Tiscali for 13 million Euros in August 2004, or Spray Network (8 portals in European countries) for 674 million Euros in September 2000, increasing the number of registered users to 8.5 million and 19 million visited pages.

Those were years of incredible success, but the dotcom crisis and bad management brought about its debacle.

At the beginning of 2004, Lycos lays off 100 workers in Europe, leaving 825. In 2005 half of the Spanish staff is laid off. They also offered them to move to other countries, especially Germany.

On the other hand, 34 IT people in France (out of 109) were offered to move to Armenia for 300€ ad 500€ a month - in other words, an offer they could not refuse.

With Telefonica and Bertelsmann group having 32% of Lycos shares (the rest in the free market), they decided to sell their equity share for 200 million Euros (Lycos was worth 10 billion Euros in the market in 2000). Today, Lycos shares are at 0.24€.

After years trying to find a buyer, they have now decided to stop their operations and save face by selling at least their domains and shopping sites.

Former General Manager in Spain perfectly explains the reasons that caused the failure of Lycos Europe. I quote:

“Instead of supporting its subsidiaries with a state-of-the-art technology regarding search engines, management spent their time promoting content with highly qualified and costly programmers and staff. They did not invest in technology or content. R&D was nonexistent. Google took the baton on search engines, and Lycos Europe was never able to find its niche. They wasted money. They wasted money on senseless TV ad campaigns, along with a terrible management, worth of being studied in business school as an example of what not to do.”

“A company cannot have more directors than workers, and this is what happened at Lycos Europe headquarters in Germany. They reached 400 workers, half of them holding a director’s position. I still remember a conference in Palma de Mallorca - of course - where I stood up during a management meeting and, in front of more than 100 directors, I asked how many of them had generated enough sales as to cover their paycheck. Only one stood up.”

Google’s virtual world platform, Lively, will foreclose on the 31^st of December. This was announced by Google on their blog.

Lively was launched by Google in July 2008, a mere four months ago. Apparently time enough to realise the service doesn’t work.

Lively is a virtual world platform where users can create their own incarnations and personalised rooms with several tools, that are free to try, and publish them on websites with an HTML code inlay.

Users communicated with each other by entering and gathering in the rooms of others, these, like any other chat room, could be public or private. They could even be decorated collectively.

Following the launch, everyone found similarities with Second Life (which isn’t precisely going through a good patch), but the truth is that any similarity with SL ended when you left a room as it didn’t allow you to wander around a complete virtual world, the way to move from one room to another was by surfing Lively’s website and selecting one from a list.

Another attempt by Google to take part in something slightly successful. In this case, they competed clearly with Second Life, which as I said, stopped being news months ago.

I have read articles that speak of total failure, dead-ly, etc. In my mind, Google did what they had to do, explore new markets and platforms with a possible market and a mass of users requesting it. In this instance it didn’t work out but, what are 4 months of work and investment for a company like Google? Pocket change.

But Lively isn’t the only problem, general virtual worlds are at a low, the only exception being the hugely successful World of Warcraft that is growing daily and is an incredible money making machine. But in this instance we are talking about a massive game with an almost permanent virtual world where every object is a jewel, precious objects that have sold on ebay for astronomical prices.

And the users, to communicate on a daily basis, prefer to use the old systems, like, e-mail, forums and chat rooms (virtual). You only need to take a look at Gmail and Groups statistics for the past year.

When a free service forecloses, the user conditions (that we never read) warn that they could foreclose whenever with no explanations or commitment, logical for a free service. The users who had scrupulously worked rooms and incarnations will no longer have them in 2009.

To say farewell to the service, Google has proposed to make captures and videos of their rooms to keep as a souvenir.

In an e-mail sent by Microsoft to groups administrators, it gives them the option to migrate their communities to a service of similar features, developed by Multiply for this purpose. The total closure of the service will take place on February 21st 2009.

According to Microsoft, this hasn’t been an easy decision. The reason of the closure is the new development of Live Groups, which will be launched on November 17th. But why don’t they wait for the development of this new service to be completed, and then migrate users?

According to Microsoft, it doesn’t make sense because of the irreconcilable differences between both services, differences that make impossible a migration. I can’t understand it because, from my point of view, everything is “migratable”, you must only want to do it. It’s in no way impossible -something different is that it is not profitable.

The options to keep the community data are reduced to migrate it automatically to Multiply. Any other option implies starting from scratch, including going on to Live Groups or to a competition’s service, of course.

I think this movement is not beneficial at all for Live nor Live Groups specifically, since they have left a large number of group administrators stranded, which will lose all the information gathered over the years, with the sole option of moving to Multiply.

I haven’t tried it out thoroughly, but I suspect this service is a fix made in a hurry that won’t have the quality of MSN Groups. Besides, there is the fact that Multiply is only offered in two languages, English and Japanese, which is causing many complaints from users.

Microsoft has enabled a Space to support migrations and answer the questions about this issue made by group administrators.

Google Video was created in January 2005 as an effort by Google to take control of Internet searches for audiovisual content.

The service was first called Google Video Search and it was created to look for information within television programs. In the beginning, it only indexed material from eight television networks in the United States. In order to view or upload videos, it was necessary to download an application to your computer. The aim was to create an online television channel.

It was released in permanent beta status, as is usual with all new Google services. In Google’s words, the company justified its new creation with the following statement: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes video.”

By now you all know that Google bought YouTube in October 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. But Google Video was created even before YouTube, although the aims of the two were completely different. YouTube focused on users, collecting their content at no charge and exclusively through the use of its browser, something which Google Video did not do, and which was surely the cause of its failure.

Google Video used an application called Google Video Viewer as its desktop application. The development of this application came out of the VLC Video LAN open source project. This was a major obstacle for users, who had many problems with its use and installation. Meanwhile, YouTube made it possible to view and upload videos without the need for any additional software.

In January 2006, Google announced a service to supplement the video search engine, called Google Video Store, where users could access audio-visual content by paying for it. The content was supplied by firms such as Sony BMG.

Four months after the presentation of Google Video Store and more than a year after the launch of the video search engine (May 2006), Google Video had barely captured 6.48% of the world’s searches for online videos, ranking 5th after YouYube (42.94%), MySpace (24.22%), Yahoo! (9.58%) and MSN (9.21%).

After the acquisition of YouTube, the fate of Google Video was uncertain. In the summer of 2007 the paid content service was shut down and all of its interests were devoted to the new acquisition, the absolute leader in online video: YouTube.

Currently, the service is only used as a video search engine for different sources such as YouTube, Google Video itself, Daily Motion and Metacafe. Although it continues to allow video uploads, the vast majority of those indexed are from other services.

Experts say the most logical thing is that it will end up disappearing. But for the moment, there it remains.

I decided to write about Altavista after being contacted by a Failbeta reader, Oliver. In reality, as I mentioned to him, perhaps it is necessary to talk about various search engines which have fallen by the wayside due to the success of the absolute leader, Google. We’ll leave that for later articles. Let’s take a look at the history of this search engine, which was once the largest and most used in the world.

Altavista was created by Louis Monier and Michael Burrows of the company Digital in December 1995. Monier would later work for Google until August 2007, when he left to create the new search engine Cuil. As for Burrows, he later worked for Microsoft and currently works for Google. Google’s success caused an amazing influx of talent from its competitors.

Altavista was hugely successful from the start. It went from receiving 300,000 hits on its first days to 80 million hits a day two years later. In 1996 it became the search provider for Yahoo! and two years later, in 1998, it was bought by Compaq. It was then later bought by Overture in 2003, and this company was in turn bought by Yahoo!. Remarkable.

If we look back a few years we can see what in my opinion was a missed opportunity for various search engines of the time. Before there was a Google Inc. and the Google search engine, when it was only a project of two university students at Stanford, Altavista (and other search engines) rejected the offer of Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide searches through the use of a revolutionary technology they had developed, PageRank.

It was in March 1998, when Altavista had a 54% share of the world’s searches, that Page and Brin met with Paul Flaherty (architect of Altavista) at a Palo Alto restaurant to offer him access to their new technology for one million dollars. Even though it recognized the superior quality of their new technology, Altavista’s policy of not depending on third parties caused them to reject the offer. The reasons for rejecting it may have seemed logical at the time, and businesses take so many turns that today we could be talking about Altavista as the world’s top search engine and Page and Brin as Altavista employees.

Here we are speaking of Altavista as a search engine. but Altavista has other services with which it has also had problems. This is the case of the flat-rate Internet access the company announced, which was never launched in the UK and which in August 2000 led to the resignation of its general manager.

In 2000, the company’s president (Rod Schorock) left his position, apparently to spend time with his family. What we do know is that the company then acknowledged that the search engine’s hits were plummeting and that the service was not even available. In 2001, it dropped from 14 to 50 in the ranking of most visited websites and laid off 340 workers.

And what has happened to Altavista today? Today’s reality is quite different: the search engine only receives some 250,000 hits a day and uses the search engine of Yahoo!, the same company that, as I told you, once used the Altavista search engine. Ironic.

Yahoo! Mash was another social network by Yahoo!, launched in September of 2007. After a failed attempt to purchase Facebook, they decided to create a new social network.

Mash wanted to be Myspace, My Yahoo! and Facebook all together. They had even planned to publish an application platform like the latter.

As distinguishing elements they had the wiki mode, by which every contact from your network was able to edit pages or add modules. As elements inspired in Myspace, they offered the possibility of customizing pages to an extent that they could damage our pupils. I recommend you the analysis that Antonio Ortiz made then.

Two days ago, its closure was announced. They don’t explain the reason, but we can imagine it. These words by Mariano Amartino may serve as reflection:

“If it was that simple to make a community grow, Google would have never bought YouTube, Yahoo! would have never bought MyBlogLog and some media would be already the owners of the whole traffic of the countries where they have influence.”

Yahoo! still has Yahoo! 360. What I don’t know is how long it will take until we speak about it here.