Fotopedia Is Shutting Down; Data Avallable Until August 10 45
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."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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.
Welcome to the world of the Cloud... (Score:5, Informative)
... where your data disappears and your apps stop working the moment the company goes under.
Post-PC era my ass.
Re: (Score:1)
It's all smoke and mirrors...
well.... (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.
Re: (Score:3)
And that makes it less likely that this will happen,
*cough* mega.com *cough*
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (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.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 d
Re: (Score:2)
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 p
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
... 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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...
Re: (Score:2)
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'
current fortune in the /. footer: (Score:2)
Like the backups of your Fotopedia submissions.
Translation... (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.
$unknown_site is shutting down (Score:5, 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.
Oh No! (Score:5, 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.
When everything you have is in the cloud (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
So the new IT bubble starts bursting (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Holy crap. That almost hurt to see. Those are the kind of pages that I have to mouse swipe just to read. Yeeesh.
Paging the Archive Team (Score:2)
http://archiveteam.org/index.p... [archiveteam.org]
Save your fotopedia data to Evernote (Score:1)