Web 2.0 Acquisitions

On December 1st, 2008 Mark Wubben wrote:

Today saw the acquisition of Pownce by Six Apart. Just like last week's acquisition of Values of n by Twitter, the acquisitions seem to be about the technology and the team, rather than the community. Quite the same can be said for last years acquisition of Jaiku by Google: given the subsequent developments, it has become clear that Google wanted the people, mostly Jyri Engeström and the chops of the mobile team. Similar for the JotSpot acquisition two years ago, though not so for YouTube.

The interesting development here though is that Six Apart and Twitter are upfront about their intentions, and are closing down the services at two weeks notice. Pownce is providing the ability to export your content:

Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

Values of n is doing much the same thing:

Can I take my data with me?

But of course! Both Stikkit and I want Sandy provide RSS/Atom and iCalendar feeds of your data that can be downloaded to your computer (and then uploaded to/imported into any other desktop application or online service that supports these same standards.

I want Sandy: Visit http://iwantsandy.com/help/feeds for information on I want Sandy's data feeds.

Stikkit also has a programmatic interface -- the Stikkit API -- that provides more comprehensive access to your data, both directly and through one of the many third-party tools and applications built against it. Visit http://stikkit.com/api#feeds for details.

We will be providing some additional export functionality in the days to come should our users require anything beyond what is provided in these feeds.

While I'm happy to see export features, it must be quite horrible to see your service / community disappear like that. At least Jaiku is still more or less running.

Perhaps we need a Web 2.0 Asylum, for users of now-dead services?

Of course, closing down the services may be a sign of the not-so-encouraging economic times. Without enough revenue to make it worthwhile to keep the services running, it's probably best to shut them down instead.

[acquisition, jotspot, google, twitter, sixapart, pownce, web2.0, downturn] [2 comments]