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

  • All of the 1UP Network and related properties shut down on January 31, 2009. [1]
  • Ficlets.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [2]
  • Circavie.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [3]
  • Co.mments.com announced they are closing on January 11, 2009.
  • Jpgmag is a collaborative photo magazine that announced it would shut down on January 5, 2009. It seems to have gained little more steam from community support, but it's still advisable that we download the archives.
  • Brijit.com, a news aggregation site, closed on May 15, 2008. It might be closed for good. [4]
  • 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. [5]

When the Big Guys Cough, their Subsites get The Flu

  • Flickr (owned by Yahoo) dumped significant staff, including prominent developers.
  • Livejournal is not looking so hot, (..but let's give it a 8 out of 10 score for now; it looks better.)

Dead as a Doornail

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. [6]

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. [7]
  • Castle Cops put away their badges on December 23, 2008. [8]
  • 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. [9]
  • Pownce was closed on December 15, 2008.
  • Yahoo Live! died on December 3, 2008. [10]
  • 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. [11]
  • Wallop, Microsoft's attempt at starting a social network, died on September 18, 2008. All that remains is a few Facebook apps. [12] [13]
  • Virtual Magic Kingdom closed its gates on May 21, 2008. [14] 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.
  • Infoanarchy A simple database error that could be fixed with one command KO'd this site unexpectedly with a wealth of P2P information lost. moeller@scireview.de could bring it back or transfer it, if he was so inclined. [15]
  • Think Secret was killed by Apple and shut down on February 14, 2008. [16]
  • Uber.com was a social blog site that died. [17]
  • Social.fm couldn't stand up to Last.fm, and died. [18]

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.

Other Sites Remember the Dead

Tragic

Humorous