Consolidation is a bummer (updated)
Posted on 02. Dec, 2008 in New Media
I Want Sandy and Pownce, two of my favorite web services, will be shutting down in the next couple weeks after being acquired by larger sites. I use I Want Sandy all the time to send myself little reminders: send @s a direct message on Twitter like “buy milk 5pm tomorrow” and she reminds me by SMS and email tomorrow at 5pm to buy milk. Incidentally, it was was Twitter that bought value of n, the company that created Sandy. People seem to think that the point of the acquisition was mostly about Twitter wanting to hire values of n CEO Rael Dornfest.
I don’t use Pownce as much as Sandy, but it was really useful to send large files to friends. Pownce got bought by Six Apart, the company that created LiveJournal and TypePad among other blogging products.
It’s not surprising that smaller sites are looking for buyers before the economy gets any worse, but it’s a bummer for their users. As Dave Slusher points out, we do in fact pay for these “free” services:
Time is more limited and precious to me [than money], so making me waste my time is worse than wasting my money when they are anywhere near, like within an order of magnitude. The switching cost of putting in a new service and getting used to it is non-trivial and I and every other user of Sandy or any other Web 2.0 service have every right to be pissed when you successfully convince us to insinuate your service into our lives and then pull the plug.
I guess I’ll just find some other gender role-reinforcing anthropomorphic website to tell me when to do my laundry.
UPDATE 12/4: Some really, really nice people are building an open source Sandy! They’re looking for suggestions on their blog, Twitter, and Google Code.
