Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Fotopedia Is Shutting Down; Data Avallable Until August 10

Posted by timothy on from the grab-now-if-you-want-any dept.

New submitter Randall Booth writes Fotopedia has sent notice to its users that it is shutting down. 'We are sorry to announce that Fotopedia is shutting down. As of August 10, 2014, Fotopedia.com will close and our iOS applications will cease to function. Our community of passionate photographers, curators and storytellers has made this a wonderful journey, and we'd like to thank you for your hard work and your contributions. We truly believe in the concept of storytelling but don't think there is a suitable business in it yet. If you submitted photos and stories to Fotopedia, your data will be available to download until August 10, 2014. After this date, all photos and data will be permanently deleted from our servers."

45 comments

  1. Who used this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've never heard of this site before.

  2. Only ten days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wow, talk about short notice. I hope they email their users every day with reminders and warnings until they've downloaded their photos.

    1. Re:Only ten days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's especially bad since disk space is essentially free these days. They have no real reason to delete the data. Maybe they can't keep it on-line, but they could still send archived data to users who asked.

    2. Re:Only ten days? by x0ra · · Score: 1

      Nothing is free. If the company's shutting down, there will not be anybody to pay the bills :-/

    3. Re:Only ten days? by Cramer · · Score: 2

      Hosting isn't free. Bandwidth isn't free.

      Sure, the hard drives could be left sitting on a shelf for 50 years, but won't do anyone any good.

    4. Re:Only ten days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Bandwidth isn't free."

      It definitely comes *very* close to free.

  3. Who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who?

  4. Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... where your data disappears and your apps stop working the moment the company goes under.

    Post-PC era my ass.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    1. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by jimmetry · · Score: 1

      It's all smoke and mirrors...

    2. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The warning comes just one-and-a-half week before all is destroyed, in the middle of the holliday season. that means there is a good chance a number of their (well-valued) customers/contributors will read the final notice when its too late.

      "Thanks for all your effort people, but its really too much to ask of us to have you warned earlier, or leave the server up for just another month."

    3. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by Animats · · Score: 2

      ... where your data disappears and your apps stop working the moment the company goes under.

      Right.

      Last night I went to a panel in SF on the "House of the Future", which all participants interpreted to mean "hooking your appliances up to the Cloud for access via phone apps". When your cloud-based home control provider goes bust, (or just discontinues the "obsolete" interface your devices used) your gadgets will stop working.

      People with cloud-based garage door openers, you have been warned.

    4. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People with cloud-based garage door openers, you have been warned.

      For people who didn't know, there really is such a thing.

      I cannot, for the life of me, come up with a more profoundly stupid idea if I tried. Your account gets hacked or your phone stolen, and a burglar has carte blanch access to everything you own.

    5. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      Are they even talking about using enterprise principals of firewalling, local hardware with storage and security at ALL? Or is it all cloud apps with logins the whole way down?

      --
      Good-bye
    6. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by grep+-v+'.*'+* · · Score: 1

      ... where your data disappears and your apps stop working the moment the company goes under.

      Where's goatse when you need it? Oh wait, it's offline too...

      --
      If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
    7. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by knarf · · Score: 1

      Post-PC is debatable, some people really don't use a 'traditional' personal computer (as in a laptop or desktop running a 'traditional' desktop operating system) any more. Instead, they use a mixed bag of mobile gadgets, slimmed-down laptops running something like ChromeOS, etc.

      But... that does not mean the 'P' in 'PC' can be tossed with the garbage. Far from it, now more than ever that P is the most important letter in the acronym soup. It just means you might want to change the acronym to 'Personal Cloud' if you want to stay in the fashionable terminology, or use a more sensible 'PS' as in 'Personal Server' to say what you really mean. That personal server should be somewhere under your own control, not running on a virtual machine in some server room far away. You should be able to pull the plug, literally. You should be able to wipe (or demolish) the storage, again literally.

      In other words, just stick a box under the stairs running a free unix of choice, install those services you intend to use, either in the traditional way or using some fancy 'cloud' software like owncloud and use that in combination with your mobile gadgets. Personal Cloud. Personal Server.

      Personal.

      --
      --frank[at]unternet.org
    8. Re:Welcome to the world of the Cloud... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are only three scenarios where I am likely to use Cloud services:

      1. I have data which is disposable and/or can be recovered easily from local storage/backups. If the Cloud provider goes under, big deal, the data either wasn't important enough to worry about or I already have a mirrored version available on my own drivers. In this situation, the Cloud is purely there for easy access to files from anywhere as opposed to using it for storage.

      2. I run my own Cloud (or if you like, server). If I know that I'm the one under complete control over the hardware and services, then I'm much more likely to rely on it for more in-depth uses because I can trust it more.

      3. I have no real alternative. I use Gmail as opposed to running my own email server because frankly, Google would do a better job of handling spam and attacks than I could ever hope to accomplish. Running a well-designed and functioning email server is a full-time job and I've already got one of those. Nevermind the fact that if you run your own email server you won't be on those lists a lot of ISPs and companies use to whitelist known and "trusted" email domains, hence you might find your emails never reaching their destinations.

      In short, the cloud is amazing at showing who's ignorant of history and who cares more about control over their files than simple convenience.

  5. What a great service! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is exactly the service that i want, i was looking for something like this for along time
    Thank you /.

  6. current fortune in the /. footer: by ChipMonk · · Score: 1

    "You will lose an important disk file."

    Like the backups of your Fotopedia submissions.

  7. well.... by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    it was a free service. want to rely on the cloud, dont be a cheap ass and pay for a commercial account somewhere.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:well.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And that makes it less likely that this will happen, but if the company goes under your data is gone.

    2. Re:well.... by sabri · · Score: 2

      And that makes it less likely that this will happen,

      *cough* mega.com *cough*

      --
      I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
    3. Re:well.... by lgw · · Score: 1

      And if your PC gets stolen? If you hang your data on Amazon or Microsoft clouds, your odds of either of those 2 going under this decade are pretty low on the scale of real-world risks.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:well.... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning.

      FWIW, I seem to recall approx. that already having happened, though I can't give a specific reference. The only real answer is to make backups BEFORE you put the data out to the cloud, and keep the backups (and test them periodically).

      Trusting a(nother) company to guard your data has a long history of failures. But so does relying on local backups. You need both.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    5. Re:well.... by lgw · · Score: 2

      Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning

      Not really. MS is entirely "cloud first" under the new CEO, and Amazon's investors are really intent on AWS as the cool part of Amazon. Next decade the world could change, of course, but for now those clouds are the jewels of 2 profoundly successful companies. Google, OTOH, I don't trust one bit these days.

      I see "the cloud" as the best possible backup - I can't envision a disaster that would take out both my place and that distant data center, without being the nuclear-war sort of event that would make data backups the least of my worries.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    6. Re:well.... by OverlyGenericUsernam · · Score: 1

      While it wasn't without warrning sort of thing, something related would be when Microsoft shutdown the PlaysForSure music service (http://macdailynews.com/2008/04/23/microsoft_to_shut_down_playsforsure_drm_services_strand_customers/) which had the effect of locking music bought to whatever current allowed pcs and no others due to DRM.

    7. Re:well.... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Exactly. The "cloud" has a few absolutely killer apps. Offsite backup services are one of them, and everyone who has anything remotely important on their machines should be using one of them. No excuses at this point. My NAS device automatically backs up to my Amazon S3 account, which is so inexpensive for the few GB I need to backup, it literally costs me pennies per month ($.07 last month, in fact). Seriously, if you don't have huge amounts of data to backup, it's unbelievably cheap, since you only pay for what you need.

      The other killer app I use is device synchronization, which is especially handy for my various Kindle devices / device apps (i.e. iPad, phone, PC, and Kindle, of course). I purchase Steam games as well, another sort of remote service and data synchronization type of platform, albeit of a specialized nature.

      Think it's weird or hypocritical to be all-in like that with Amazon services or Steam but still be so leery of the cloud as an end-all be-all? Maybe, but this isn't about some religious aversion to the cloud - it's completely pragmatic from my point of view. If you're going to put your apples in a remote data basket, make sure it's a basket that's not likely to go *poof* anytime soon (i.e. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Apple). And make sure it's a basket where, if it does disappear, you're not completely boned. I'd miss my book or my games library, but I could live without them. I could *not* live without what's on my PC. Quite literally, in fact, since I work from home. So, there it stays.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  8. Translation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Facebook, Twitter and Google weren't interested in buying us out and making us rich beyond all reason, so fuck it all.

    1. Re:Translation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You madam, are a nameless coward.

  9. Not too long until we see a similar headline... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But the first word will be "Flickr".

    1. Re:Not too long until we see a similar headline... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or "Slashdot"

  10. $unknown_site is shutting down by istartedi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Raise your hand if you never heard of it. There's just too many people that want to do this kind of thing. I don't think it would have helped them, but the site design sucks too. 1. Metro-like on the front page, always a bad sign. 2. Read the article on Zanskar, which is interesting except that the borderless wall of photos that fill the window is too hard to scroll through on my machine... It jerk, Jerk, JERKS and I have to play finger games to maybe get it to line up right. Don't make it hard on your users like that.

    I suppose it all looks great on an iPad, but really... writing code that accomodates different (and not nearly as uncommon as you think) browsers really shouldn't be that hard.

    Of course none of that would have saved them because like I said, there's too much of this stuff already.

    I look forward to more $unknown_site is shutting down articles on /. in the future.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  11. Oh No! by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oh no, Fotopedia is shutting down. First, the mandatory "Who the hell is Fotopedia?"

    But then the translation: Hype-speak "We truly believe in the concept of storytelling but don't think there is a suitable business in it yet." translates to "Apple or Google or anyone else with more money than sense failed to offer us billions of $$$ for our little toy, so anyone who backed us with their IP can't play with us any more."

    As to the quickness of a ten day window, I don't think that is a real issue. Anyone foolish enough to not have retained copies of their images that they store with Fotopedia may lose them, but they gain an important life lesson in return.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  12. When everything you have is in the cloud by azav · · Score: 2

    nothing is yours.

    --
    - Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
    1. Re:When everything you have is in the cloud by lgw · · Score: 1

      Was fotopedia "the cloud"? Seems like just a web service just like any other service from the BBS days. Of course, not keeping a local copy of anything in the cloud is a bit silly, but for goodness sake pick a "cloud" with at least 1 million servers, not neverheardofit.com.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  13. missing tag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    andnothingofvaluewaslost

  14. Clouds are ephemeral. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's called the "cloud" as it can simply evaporate into nothingness. Also, if it gets big enough, it's likely to rain on your parade.

  15. So the new IT bubble starts bursting by jonfr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So it appears that the new IT bubble (or internet bubble 2.0) is starting to show signs that it is about to burst. It always starts with companies like this one, since they normally run out of money first. This collapse is going to be interesting.

  16. Until Now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...I had never heard of Fotopedia. Now, it appears to be slashdotted.

  17. With a webdesign that.... by Xenolith0 · · Score: 0

    Sucks. I can see why no one used them.

    black background, some random blue links.... Looks like something I designed when I was 12.

    http://f.xn0.org/sillywebdevs.PNG

    1. Re:With a webdesign that.... by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      Holy crap. That almost hurt to see. Those are the kind of pages that I have to mouse swipe just to read. Yeeesh.

  18. Paging the Archive Team by fche · · Score: 1

    http://archiveteam.org/index.p...

  19. Save your fotopedia data to Evernote by matthewayne · · Score: 1

    If you want to save your fotopedia data go to http://www.fotopediatoevernote... to save your fotopedia data to your Evernote account.

  20. Fotopedia Alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are a few Fotopedia alternatives out there. Check out our list here:

    https://bonjourn.al/blog/17-fotopedia-alternatives-a-short-list