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 ...

Weekendr was a social network launched in October 2006 where the users organised weekend activities and shared them with other members. The principal objective was to make new friends. Another of its features was to inform you about what your friends were going to do during the weekend and to allow you to sign up to their plans. It boasted all the typical social networking functions, personal blogs and it allowed you to customise its appearance. In the first week of its launch, 300 users registered thanks to the interest it aroused on a number of blogs, amongst them Mashable. It was released by a German company but the site was available only in English; surely a preliminary step towards a greater internationalisation that never came to be. The creator of Weekendr is a German 39 years old; a CEO of a company that develops games for mobiles and casual games for PC. His name is Andreas Schneider and he lives very close to Cologne (Germany). He developed and designed the social network in just a month using Microsoft ASP (Active Server Pages).

Microsoft announced yesterday that they will close the MSN Groups service. 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, ...

Mygazines.com was a social network that was launched in June this year and lasted only 5 months online. Yesterday its closure was announced. Mygazines allowed users to share online their favourite publications (especially magazines). In addition, they were rewarded with a part of the benefits of the advertising displayed on the site. It had the typical social features of a network and used a special browser that didn't allow the downloading of magazines. In their servers, they hosted all type of publications, with the Creative Commons licence (when they were originals provided by users) and those with copyright. They had several complete issues of lots of magazines such as MacWorld, Business Week, Forbes, etc. As you can imagine, the success was absolute -online magazines for free! That was precisely the reason of its closure, the violation of magazines's copyright. Publishers soon came down on them, pressing them for the immediate closure. Mygazines advertisers quit contracting advertising and the first serious legal actions arrived. From the user's point of view, the idea was great, but this was a project doomed to failure. A distribution agreement with publishers might be a good business model, although maybe not profitable, at least legal.

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 ...