via Gowalla’s Blog (which is inconveniently hosted on Tumblr which goes down often and could go away one day so much for data longevity and this blog even being around 1 year from now):
Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.
Every day, for many years, I opened Gowalla on my iPhone, picked a place, checked in and attached a photo or a note. I syndicated that check-in to Facebook and Twitter. It’s safe to say that 5% of my tweets are check-ins linking to Foursquare, Brightkite or Gowalla and a few dozen hours of time over 2 years was spent checking-in. Now, that data is gone but will be made available via a download from Gowalla in some way.
I used to be an early adopter. I used to jump in head first to every new service. Robert Scoble does this but I can’t anymore. After watching Scobleizer spend hours each day on FriendFeed for an entire year and then see FriendFeed sold to Facebook and abandoned, I want to cry for Robert. His data is just gone and that time he spent was wasted! How could he not be upset about this? He just moved to Google+ with a blink of an eye and started doing the same thing after spending years on Twitter, months on Quora and many more years on his own blog. I just feel like this jumping ship is insane. That’s why the majority of my important thoughts are placed here, backed up daily and syndicated to networks that are impermanent. I don’t expect Facebook to last my life time but the words I write here are backed up and can be recalled 100 years from now by my grandchildren. That’s important to me. I guess it’s not to other people.
No one in the tech world seems to care that their investment in Gowalla is being thrown away. I’m pissed but no one else is. Why not?
via Pinboard’s blog (which appears to be hosted on Pinboard’s servers directly. I respect startups who host their own blogs):
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.
So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.
Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!
I agree but there’s an important distinction between VC backed startups who aim to increase the investor’s money by 10-100x within a few years and companies that are built to be large money-making companies that bring value the world but not always value to the investors in 10-20 years. Imagine if Sequoia backed Apple Computer released the Apple II and then the VC said it’s time to sell to IBM and they were forced to do that. Imagine that world. Luckily they remained independent, went public and are still here today. I believe Gowalla could have done that or at least remained a business that made enough money to continue on forever.
I’m currently “all in” on Path which is a scary thing. Path is a great journal but, if 6 months goes by and there’s no export feature for my data, I’m going to start raising hell. The reason is that I love Path because it enables me to quickly journal everything in one interface with a beautiful timeline. The sharing features are extra fluff that I don’t care about. I want a journaling app for personal reasons. If that data is forever stuck on Path’s servers until they get bought by Facebook, well I’m going to be pissed.
My data is precious to me and my data is a time investment and my data has immense value to me and if I’m going to create it, I had better own it or have access to it FOREVER. If my grandkids can’t access it, I won’t use it. Looks like I’m alone on that one though.
I’m going to miss Gowalla. It was an amazing location application. They are promising to let us keep our data. When Brightkite shut down, they offered a data download but it required a lot of engineering knowledge and I could never figure it out. I worked there and my photo, comments and check-ins are lost forever. What a bummer. That data was fare more important than the paycheck I collected there and now it’s gone. I’m sick of companies doing that to us. I won’t stand for it anymore.