As a lot of great, new web applications and communities like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Audioscrobbler are taking off and making moves (Flickr was acquired by Yahoo!, the developer of del.icio.us is going to get to focus on it full-time, Audioscrobbler is hiring developers), I’ve noticed a handful of formerly-popular web applications from the last few years have been quietly disappearing. Here are two…
A couple years back I talked about Blogtrack, an application meant to monitor weblogs for updates. It was an old idea simplified and updated, but it was quickly passe as RSS and Atom feeds were built into just about every popular blogging platform. I used to use it for monitoring Blogger blogs, which didn’t offer syndication for the longest time, but now it’s just monitoring a half-dozen or so hand-rolled sites without feeds. I only check it every few weeks. But it seems that there’s not much new going on with it. For at least a year, the front page has said: “The newest version of blogtrack has been a long time in the making, and we are finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnle [sic]. There will be no more signups until the new version is released.” Methinks there will be no new version.
Allconsuming‘s server was hacked a little while ago and its maintainer has announced he’s taking a little time off from it. But, even so, not much had been done with Allconsuming since it burst onto the scene a couple years back as a great way to keep track of which books you were reading and what others were saying about them. I’ve used it on my own blog and hope that it returns and builds on all the potential it has.
Do you have any favorite web apps that have slowly fizzled out or been phased out over the last few years?
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