Category: Internet Graveyard

Sites come and go. This category describes those gone.

Taken Aback by the Shutting Down of Clipmarks and Amplify

Clipmarks Shutting Down

Without any Advance Notice

Both Clipmarks and Amplify show the same notice:

Clipmarks (and Amplify with the same notice) is shutting down immediately. We’ve had a wonderful run and we are grateful to everyone for taking the journey with us.

We’ve arranged for all of our users to be granted Clipboard accounts, which we believe is the best place for you to continue clipping the Web. Our existing users will receive an invitation by email, but anyone else can request an invitation directly at www.clipboard.com.

Clipboard will hold Clipmarks’s databases in trust and if there is sufficient interest they will provide a migration tool to import Clipmarks clips into Clipboard.

Please visit the Clipboard Blog for more information about this news.

Now What?

I’ve visited ClipBoard and signed up, but refuse for the moment to clip anything. Especially because Clipboard is very vague about what it is going to do about the data put in trust. Today I visited the blog post again….97 comments thus far. There will be more definitely.

Sure services can and do shut down. Doing so without the possibility to save your activities is inexcusable….

Why Taken Aback?

I was especially taken aback because I enthused about it in Testing Clipmarks.

N.B. In a comment back in October 2009 I said:

Only question is what happens if the original content will be removed – what will happen with the clip -, but I have a feeling it is also stored on the Clipmark server, we will see.

So why moan? Actually because I’m a bit mad – mad on my self- because I had to manually re edited many posts here and on our sister blog, while I knew!

Well it’s done now.

Imagine when Pinterest shuts down, or FaceBook…..

Tweepml added to the Internet Graveyard?

TweepML ceased operation.

I was enthusiast (Using Tweepml to Manage your Twitter Contacts and do away with #ff and #tt) about their easy interface to make lists of Twitter followers. However in autumn 2010 they were banned by Twitter and although they seemed in operation again in autumn 2011 (albeit with hiccups), they are not there anymore… Their site has been down for over a month now and their last twitter activity dates back to half January 2012. Their url seems paid for until July 2012.

Sad! RIP TweepML.

Leftovers

TweepML-(tweepml)-on-Twitter

As always you still can find some leftovers as for instance a Twitter account with over 10k followers and a klout score of 19…LOL that says something for Klouts precision.

A nifty replacement for TweepML? Anybody?

The Internet Graveyard – Slideshow

Internet Graveyard
Found this telling photo at FunnyPhotos.net.au

Intro

Sites come and sites go. The longer you blog, the more blogs and internet services you’ll find disappearing or becoming something else, because they stopped, were merged, acquired or simply wanted to start earning some (more) money.

For some time I used to keep track of blogs that passed away in a category Dead TravelBlog Society.

Recently I’ve been confronted with several services being closed down. Services that I used in one way or another for my blogs. Therefore I’ve decided to create a second, broader category “Internet Graveyard“. For the moment I’ll leave the two existing next to each other and sometimes overlapping each other.

How to keep track of all the changes?

Every WordPress Blogger should use the nifty WordPress plugin by the name of Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts of W-Shadow.com. See for W-Shadow’s blog post regarding the pluging W-Shadow | Broken Link Checker. I’ve been using it a couple of months now and it is a great tool to keep your blog lean and mean with links that work.

From time to time, through this plugin you’ll find out that one or another nifty 3rd party service you are using has stopped.

And Slide.com did Stop

According to its site, Slide.com has closed down as of March 6, 2012 and is not longer available.

Luckily I had to rework just one post where I had used their Slideshow.

Furthermore they seem to have given a nice advanced warning of their plans:

Update on Slide’s products and our commitment to our users
(8/25/2011)

We wanted to give you all advance notice that in the coming months, a number of Slide’s products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide’s products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party. We created products with the goal of providing a fun way for people to connect, communicate and share. While we are incredibly grateful to our users and for all of the wonderful feedback over the years, many of these products are no longer as active or haven’t caught on as we originally hoped.
Most importantly, we wanted to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re committed to helping our users preserve their data as easily as possible. We recognize that many of you have stored valuable content with us and want to assure you that, wherever possible, you will have ample time to download that information or transfer it to another service.

For example, on Slide.com, we will enable users to either download their photos or export them to a Picasa account. We are working to release this export feature over the coming weeks and, once added, users will have several months to take advantage of transferring their photos.

In this respect they have done better than some other services I will address shortly.

Using Tweepml to Manage your Twitter Contacts and do away with #ff and #tt

  1. In January 2009 I complained how slow the Twitter interface is.
  2. Not much has changed since then for the better, especially since Twitter took away their pagination of tweets and from followers and following. Until then you could at least figure out where you had to look by fiddling a bit with their pagination. Now you have to wade through window after window.
  3. Looking up an old tweet it is also difficult, because there is a limit of (I believe) 3200 tweets the Twitter API allows you to look up. Unfortunately the way around that Storytlr has ceased to exist and changed into a community project that I have not been able to figure out yet
  4. If you want to look up a contact it’s not easy, especially if you don’t remember the exact name of who you are looking for. In January 2009, as proliferate list maker, I had set out to manually compose such list of my contacts and incorporate it here on a page to be able to look up a contact quickly by Avatar. Also I want such contact list alphabetically organized. I dicontinued that a year ago, because it was too cumbersome to do manually. In addition I got more and more followers.
  5. Fortunately, in the meantime Twitter has introduced Twitter Lists and Tweepml is building on that
  6. Although I do like the #ff and #tt principle, it annoyes me no end to see everybody doing nothing more than reiterating their love, which in my view is boring and a waste of twitterspace. Therefor it is ideal to make a couple of niche lists on Tweepml and give them #ff or #tt love. For your followers it is less cumbersome and if they want to, they can in one click follow your entire list if they want
  7. I myself am still in the process of curtailing the number of tweeps I follow. Especially since I use twitter on my mobile…the more tweeps you follow the more cluttered your mobile can get.

How to do it?

I had to delete this section, because after being banned by Twitter at a certain stage, Tweepml has been struggling to get their act together and get allowed by Twitter. Late 2011 it seemed they had succeeded, but somewhere in March 2012 I noticed they have disappeared completely. I think this is sad as they had a great service….

 

Last edited by GJE on March 11, 2012 at 1:41 pm

 

Testing Clipmarks [Disappeared February 2012]

clipmarks Logo

Just testing a new application:

My main dilemma is I am a two finger typist only and I have a strong desire to share my finds from all over the internet.

I tend to believe my finds are also of interest to my readers.

A decent way of doing this is manually copying and pasting information into a WP post, edit it and then add the url to the original information location. That, however is very time consuming. Even editing a Carnival post takes a lot of time. I simply lack the time to do it that proper!

On the other hand I don’t want to become a “scraper”, someone who simply imports via an RSS import plugin without any original thought or pointer.

Thus far I have tried several approaches, like:

  • Sharing reads in my Google reader and putting a Google reader widget here in the side column. Recently I found out through a nifty Firefox Plugin, called firebug, that all widgets take waaay too much time to load. Hence I kicked all widgets from my side box including the Google one. Then I tried to import shares from my Google reader in a separate page…didn’t get it working.
  • Earlier, for some time I believed Tumblring (off course there are other services alike Tumblr) was the solution. It even seems possible to Tumblr from your own site, but digging into the necessary code took me too much time and I abandoned the project.
  • I have been using the Quickpress plugin for WordPress. Problem with that is you only can clip and paste one paragraph and can hardly edit it. Moreover Quickpress copies the original title of a post…mostly I don’t want to copy the title at all, because it doesn’t fit in this blog. Finally you always ought to make clear that you clipped something from someone else. Time permitting I solved it by adding b-quotes around somebody elses text.
  • The Press it plugin which is part of the WordPress suite does some things similar to Quickpress. At least you can save the clip as a draft post and then attack it from the WordPress editor. However, with my lateral approach of everything including blogging, I use to have a constant flow of about 80-100 draft posts lying around here withaout the attention they deserve. Once and for all I want to get rid of them.
  • Another approach could be using Stumble to it’s full extent: First stumble, later when you have time look back to what you stumbled and maie it into a decent post…However I am unable to fully grasp it and use it to it’s full possibilities.
  • Posting stuff as WIP (work in process) with the intention to later edit and augment it, like I am doing with this post. Actually no way to go at all, because before I edit it again something new comes up every time.
  • Then I discovered Amplify and experimented with it for a couple of weeks. I like the way you can order and edit your clips, the header and the way you can add your own thoughts. I simply put up the question if I could use it on my own blog and then one of the Amplify guys directed me to Clipmarks

Why I believe Clipmarks might work for me:

  1. You can create your own header
  2. While clipping you can very precisely choose the order of your clippings. What you clip first comes first. Usually I want to show a photo or picture first and give comments thereafter.
  3. The whole clip is clearly visible as a clip. You don’t put your reader on the wrong foot presenting something as your own product.
  4. If I want to add more obeservations to a clip I can leave the clip as it is and simply add more stuff…the clip remains as it is, a clip

Let’s see how it works.

Update March 6, 2012

Recently Clipmarks and Amplify have ceased operating. Even without an advance notice. Snap bang closed! Actually What I’ve feared from the outset. The original demo I featured here in this post is still left as a leftover on the internet. I’ve pushed it to the end of the post until it will disappear as well.

Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 4:14 pm and added to my Internet Graveyard Category