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.

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.

ImageReward was an image hosting service launched in March 2007 that permitted users to create albums, to tag them, etc. Yet the novelty of this service, as its name indicates, was that it rewarded users with points exchangeable for money.

The images could be sent from your computer or by using a URL link. The points could be exchanged directly for cheques, vouchers for Amazon or Super GiftCard. Yet it wasn’t an easy task earning money.

To earn 10 dollars it was necessary to accumulate 20,000 points. So as to give you an idea, they award you 50 points upon registering, 20 points if you invite a new user, and two points every time someone looks at one of your images.

The points are earned when the images are displayed by means of a special link that show advertising around it. It’s curious to see how the users failed to trust the viability of the service and advised against using it as a repository for images that you don’t wish to lose.

And that’s the way it’s been; the service hung up a sign saying “We’ll be back in a few months” (approximately in September 2007). A year has already passed and the service hasn’t come back online and the users have lost the images they uploaded.

User revenue is a very valid system that makes a community of users feel more identified and involved with the project. Yet we must not confuse this with enslaving the user. To attain 20,000 points was the result of a more than notable contribution to the system, and it translated into 10 measly dollars.

The differentiating element of ImageReward was to share revenue; the rest was the same as any other images hosting website. In my opinion, they should have taken more care of this element.