Deathwatch

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The Deathwatch is meant to be a central indicator of websites and networks that are shutting down, or to serve as an indicator of what happened to particular sites that shut down quickly. New sites should be added in chronological order, newest death date first. Forward-looking death dates should be added to the first list only. Sites large enough to warrant additional information will receive a dedicated page, linked from here.

Pining for the Fjords

  • Archive Team is declaring Yahoo no longer a trustable entity. Prove us different, Yahoolagans.
  • Lycos Europe have announced they are shutting down their Tripod hosting service on February 15, 2009. [1] [2] Note that Lycos Europe are distinct from Lycos.com. Lycos Europe is also shuttering the social networking site Jubii as of February 15, 2009. [3] A Danish version of the site will remain open for the time being.
  • Several Google services have announced that they will be shutting down. [4]
  • Co.mments.com announced they are closing on January 11, 2009.
  • JPG Magazine announced it would shut down on January 5, 2009 [5], but the site still lives and there is hope.
  • Brijit.com, a news aggregation site, closed on May 15, 2008. It might be closed for good. [6]
  • The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale and if it doesn't find a buyer by February 10, 2008, the print will stop after 146 years and the website will be shut down. [7]
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly has recently shut its doors. [8]
  • Culture11 ran out of money.[9]

Dead as a Doornail

2009

  • Home of the Underdogs went bankrupt, Feb 9th[10]
  • ma.gnolia.com had a catastrophic disk corruption/failure on January 31, 2009. From the message on the main site: "As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours." Ma.gnolia had an excellent export feature... hope you used it and did the backups they didn't!
  • Domino Magazine, a style/interior design magazine, announced that they were shutting down on January 28, 2009. My Deco File, one of the site's heavily used social bookmarking features (somewhat like delicious for images) will remain up for a few weeks to allow users to save their stuff.
  • Yahoo Pets was shut down and redirected with absolutely no notice around January 27, 2009. [11]
  • totse.com closed its doors on January 17, 2009. As of Jan 20th, a mirror exists, alongside a repository of the totse text files.
  • Ficlets.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [12]
  • Circavie.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [13]

2008

Biggest Botched Shutdowns of 2008

  • AOL Hometown (owned by AOL) was officially killed on October 31, 2008. Jason wrote about it.
  • Digitalrailroad.net, a photo hosting site, gave their users a 24-hour eviction notice on October 27, 2008. They shut down 10 hours after the 24-hour notice. [14]

Other deaths of 2008

  • Lively, a 3D Avatar space experiment, was killed in a really crappy way by Google on December 31, 2008.
  • Pingmag, the magazine from Tokyo about "Designing and Making things," simultaneously rang in the new year and checked out of existence on December 31, 2008.
  • Mixwit said goodbye on December 27, 2008. [15]
  • Castle Cops put away their badges on December 23, 2008. [16]
  • Google Research Datasets, shut down on December 19(?), 2008. [17]
  • Flip.com, a social network for teenage girls, shut down on December 16, 2008. Users were advised to print out their digital scrapbooks as backups. [18]
  • Pownce was closed on December 15, 2008.
  • I Want Sandy (WEBCITE) was shut down on December 8, 2008. A lot of people complained about this one, while others thanked the site for shutting down and wished the founder well!
  • Yahoo Live! died on December 3, 2008. [19]
  • OurWorld slipped into history on October 31, 2008.
  • BlogRush.com failed to provide bloggers with the traffic they so desperately desired, and the creator admitted on October 29, 2008 that his 4AM idea may not have been so brilliant. [20]
  • Wallop, Microsoft's attempt at starting a social network, died on September 18, 2008. All that remains is a few Facebook apps. [21] [22]
  • Virtual Magic Kingdom closed its gates on May 21, 2008. [23] The amount of broken hearts and anguish over this move was amazing, and a warning sign to any family-oriented site that encourages families to join up.
  • BBC Jam was suspended March 20, 2007 and will not be coming back.
  • Think Secret was killed by Apple and shut down on February 14, 2008. [24]
  • Uber.com was a social blog site that died. [25]
  • Social.fm couldn't stand up to Last.fm, and died. [26]

2007

Deaths of 2007

  • OiNK's Pink Palace Music Bittorrent tracker site with huge user community which cared greatly about digital content and music. Would have been a great resource for the industry to research. Shutdown October 23, 2007. [27]

Other Endangered Species

  • MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are losing their history.
  • Encyclopedia Astronautica is the most comprehensive collection of the history of space travel. Period. Seriously, the official NASA history folks will refer you this website if they can't answer your questions. However, Mark Wade (the sole creator/maintainer) abandoned his blog at the end of 2007, and the Encyclopedia has not been updated since May of 2008, despite much happening in the space exploration world since then.
  • All of the 1UP Network and related properties were bought by UGO recently, and should be watched carefully. [28]

Just When You Least Expect It

  • Archive Team keeps a list of Healthy Sites that could be fine today and not so hot tomorrow. We focus on ways to back your personal data off these sites so you don't put yourself at unnecessary risk.

Other Sites Remember the Dead

Tragic

Humorous