The Tale Of Storytlr Ends Here

Storytlr, a nifty web application centered around the concept of lifestreaming, will cease to exist at the end of this year. In a blog post, the two guys who built the service jointly announced the decision to stop operating Storytlr on December 31st 2009.

Unfortunately, all data that doesn’t get backed up by its users in the next ten weeks will be wiped out, although there is a simple tool that allows for easy export of all data and soon users will also be able to download a zip archive of their binary files (images etc.).

As to the why of the voluntarily deadpooling of Storytlr, co-developers Laurent Eschenauer and Alard Weisscher are not at all vague: they simply lost interest after deciding that the project could not be turned into a full-fledged company, and unsuccessfully trying to find alternatives routes or potential partners. And most importantly, lack of time:

The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don’t have time anymore to operate this service properly.

We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

The two men are going to try to open source the whole thing, but are not willing or able to provide an ETA since it requires significant refactoring of code. Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath for it and check out alternative services such as Soup.io, Lifestream.fm or Sweetcron in the meantime for your digital lifecasting purposes.

As a farewell salute, here’s the probable highlight of the adventure for at least one of the initiators of the project: watch Eschenauer pitch Storytlr to Google co-founder Sergey Brin: