Buxfer is a social payments service that launched in 2007 as part of that class of new Y Combinator companies. The site is still live and working, but a user, Sean Leather, emailed us to say it’s a bit of a ghost town.

The blog has been taken down and was last updated in 2009. The last tweet was on October 9, 2009, six days after their first tweet. And users are wondering if the site is dead over on Get Satisfaction.

So what happened? The two founders, Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe, took jobs at Facebook. Bhramabe joined Facebook way back in October 2008, as noted on Buxfer’s About page. But according to Pandit’s LinkedIn profile, he too left the company in June and has been full time at Facebook since late 2009.

Wesabe, an online personal finance site that looked to help users better keep track of their spending trends, is shutting down. The startup’s homepage now consists of a letter to Wesabe users instructing them to download their account information by July 31, at which point nearly all of the service’s features will be taken offline and data deleted. The lone feature that will remain online indefinitely is the site’s ‘Groups’ page, where members can trade advice about their finances (this part of the site is being taken over by one of Wesabe’s current customers).

In the letter, Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund writes that the site has been operating on a shoestring budget lately, which has led to both some poor customer experiences and the potential for security issues, which is why they’re pulling the plug:

Not that it should be a big surprise to anyone, but Radar, the social photo sharing site is entering the deadpool. An email sent out to users over the weekend confirms that May 26 at noon Pacific Time will be the end.

As I said, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that Shutterly bought Radar parent Tiny Pictures back in September of last year. Shutterfly is much, much larger than Radar ever was, so it makes sense to incorporate the best features of Radar into that product rather than keeping it alive as a standalone service.

EventVue set out three years ago to transform the way people interact with and network during events. Today, sadly, they have announced they are shutting down.

In an overlay message that appears now on the main site, co-founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser write:

At least Yahoo is consistent. At a time when many tech companies are starting to launch new projects again, and excitement is building, Yahoo keeps shutting things down.

The latest is their Shopping API, which they announced on their developer network blog today would be killed on March 11, 2010. Why? Well, Yahoo decided to enter into an agreement with PriceGrabber to power the same thing for the Yahoo Shopping area. The worst part is that not only is Yahoo shutting their own service down, but developer’s currently using the Yahoo Shopping API can’t even transition to Yahoo’s new method smoothly. As Yahoo notes, any developer that wishes to continue to display results from Yahoo Shopping will have to apply to PriceGrabber to get permission. Lame.

Right Media, the ad exchange that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for a reported $680 million in cash and stock, has recently seen its founder Michael Walrath walk away from his job as Yahoo’s SVP of Advertising Strategy.

When the announcement of Walrath’s departure was made, Yahoo at the same time declared that it would be shifting strategy for Right Media by placing more emphasis on serving as a high-quality, premium marketplace rather than contuining to be an exchange platform for high volumes of ad networks, including many small ones (zing).

They’re now making good on that promise by confirming that Right Media’s DMX (Direct Media Exchange) platform will be shut down on January 31, 2010.

It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

DotBlu, which we first covered in 2007 when it was called BluBet, had some of Silicon Valley’s highest profile angel investors backing it. But it wasn’t enough, and company hit the deadpool earlier this week.

Investors in an early angel round included Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom and Eventbrite), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive). A later $2 million round was funded by Maples Investments and DE Shaw.

The company first launched as an online betting service and then changed its name and focus to social gaming. But on October 16 the company shut everything down with a brief note to users: “Dear dotblu members: dotblu.com is down indefinitely. A big thanks to each of you for being part of our community for the past two and a half years.” The note also asks users to stay in touch via their Facebook fan page.

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 the current hot platform of choice for a lot of developers, we’re not seeing too many Twitter apps just yet in the Deadpool. But one, TwitApps, will hit it tomorrow, the developer is notifying users.

The service was a useful one that allowed you to get an automated email with all your @replies and follower notifications from Twitter. But it would appear that the developer simply got fed up trying to build a new version while continuing to “fire-fight problems” with Twitter’s API. Here’s the core part of the developer’s statement:

Socializr, the online event organization tool that first went into private beta in 2006, isn’t in good shape.

We’ve heard from a couple of sources that Socializr has laid off most or all of the staff and that the site is running on autopilot. The company confirms cost reductions but won’t go into more detail on the scope of the layoffs. From founder Jonathan Abrams:

Lookery, a startup that focuses on collecting demographic data about users and sites around the web and then selling this information to ad networks to target users, is heading to the deadpool. In a blog post, Lookery’s CEO Scott Rafer confirmed that the startup will be shutting its doors after launching in 2007.

Lookery initially started as an ad network for social applications on Facebook, and quickly encountered the troubles of making money off ads on social networks. Lookery ran a promotion for advertisers, offering a guarantee of 12.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs) in January of 2008. Lookery also made a bold play for ads on traffic from European markets, guaranteeing 25 cents per thousand impressions per advert from European traffic. But things clearly weren’t working out — by July, Lookery was downgrading its guarantee offering 7.5 cents per ad impression, cutting its rates nearly in half.

Tipjoy, a startup that allowed users to easily collect ‘tips’ from their readers and fans in the form of small Paypal transfers, is closing up shop. Earlier this evening Co-founders (and husband/wife team) Ivan and Abigail Kirigin posted a note to the Tipjoy blog announcing the site’s shutdown. Users with an outstanding positive balance will be able to cash out, but the rest of the site has been turned off.

Tipjoy tried to make web tips feasible by lowering the barrier readers would have to clear as much as possible — to leave a tip, users only had to enter their Email address, with no credit card needed. The amount of money left to a site was effectively a pledge to pay up at some point down the line (Tipjoy tallied up your tips so you could pay them all at once). Unfortunately, users often didn’t take the time to tip at all, and those that did usually didn’t actually pay up.

Facial recognition service Riya will shut down on August 21, 2009, says founder Munjal Shah in an email to users this morning. We are adding it to the TechCrunch DeadPool.

This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos, four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard. Here’s our fist full overview of the Riya product, which helped users by auto-recognizing friends in photos and tagging them.

The company came close to selling to Google, but the deal never closed. And eventually the company refocused its efforts on visual search ecommerce (and is still going strong at like.com).

The email is below.

Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page.

The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.

In early 2007 the company was sold to Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.

Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million.

Goodbye, Desktop Factory, we hardly knew ye. Desktop Factory was supposed to offer a sub-$5,000 desktop 3D printer. Alas, they are no more and they’ve sold their IP and assets to an unnamed buyer.

But a funny thing happened as we launched our effort to sell Desktop Factory. We found interested parties who do understand the exciting potential for this breakthrough technology. We found companies that value the industry and can visualize the myriad applications for this affordable printer. Most important, we have found organizations that engage with customers and truly want to be a part of this next major wave in additive fabrication.

Predictify, a prediction market that launched back in 2007, is closing its doors. The service allowed users to vote on potential outcomes for current news stories (it likened itself to a “fantasy sports for everything else”). Users could have their accuracy measured across multiple polls, both on the site’s central hub and on partner sites, and the most clairvoyant of them were featured on the Predictify leaderboard.

Last year, the site seemed like it was starting to pick up steam: by summer 2008, it had forged partnerships with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and it subsequently got CBS News as well. News sites liked Predictify because it could potentially increase reader engagement. Along with its media partnerships, Predictify also offered “Premium Questions”, which allowed businesses and market researchers to pose questions to the Predictify user base for a fee. The most accurate users would receive a portion of the money generated by the Premium Questions, and marketers were entitled to all of the resulting data (including demographics).

It must be disconcerting to a big Internet company to shut down a whole website and nobody even notices. Not even a short note on Twitter from a concerned user until now. But that’s what apparently happened.

At some point Yahoo shut down Bix, a karaoke and contest website that they acquired in late 2006. Yes, at some point in 2006 someone at Yahoo said “Karaoke? Contests? We gotta own that!”

We first wrote about Bix in July 2006 and then again in August 2006. The company had raised $6.77 million from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity, and others prior to the acquisition.

If anyone knows when exactly this shut down, we want to know. It at least needs a proper burial before dropping into the deadpool. We’ve also got an email in to Yahoo PR.

In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued without a hint of explanation about the reason for the folding, although we suspect it may have something to do with VeriSign taking over the service’s main backer late last year.

When FreeYourID launched in February 2007, we dubbed it a personalized OpenID, because it allowed users to register a unique .name domain name (e.g. first.last.name) which in turn could be used as a custom, personal OpenID identifier, website URL and e-mail host. Alas, it never got any significant traction.

An Update to our post yesterday about Sequoia-funded search startup SearchMe. The company needs a new round of financing or a quick acquisition to stay online, but so far neither are happening. CEO Randy Adams wrote to me this morning with an update on where things stand. I reprint most of it below with his permission. Bottom line, The site may go offline at least temporarily tomorrow if a buyer does not step in (Update: The site now redirects to Google):