Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more.

As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter, a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends on the web — for all to see.

The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some founder-VC drama along with Spark Capital and Tumblr, but came out alive and continued to iterate.

While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including Gchat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc.

In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool.

Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations.

And because its original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.”

Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find.

As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here.”

Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer.

Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.”

Of the new move, Leto says:

It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology.

It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.”

Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep its fires lit. It’s tough, too, considering the fact that Banters seemed like it was onto a potentially big idea. Nevertheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea.

For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here.

Daily deal community for website owners Startups.com is shutting down. In an email sent out to its mailing list subscribers, founder Gonzo Arzuaga admits that the company just “couldn’t make a go of it.”

“We didn’t achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago. So, with regret, this news of our departure from the realm of Daily Deals,” writes Arzuaga. “This may be a shocker to some of you and we want you to know that we’re really sorry we failed to achieve your expectations.”

In October 2008, KillerStartups purchased the domain name Startups.com for some $500,000 in cash. A year later, the domain was relaunched as a Q&A site for business questions. Then, in April 2011, Startups.com shifted its focus to the business model it operates today: daily deals.

The Q&A section was moved to answers.startups.com (now disabled), but the homepage began featuring discounts on things website owners, online businesses, and startup entrepreneurs would appreciate, like discounted software, gadgets, e-books, services, and other types of resources they may need to grow their company. Those same type of deals are still live on the site now, as the company hasn’t quite pulled the plug just yet.

According to Arzuaga’s email, Startups.com is not the only property that’s being terminated. BlinkList, a service that lets you save local copies of websites (which no longer seems that relevant, we admit), is also shutting down.

We reached out to Arzuaga for more info on the situation, and, as expected, he’s not too happy about how things worked out.

“Actually, I never expected to be in the spot of going on the record about shutting down a venture. I guess this is the other side of the coin in any entrepreneurial venture,” he says. “I’m really happily surprised by the 100 emails I’ve received with words of support and encouragement from our subscribers (we sent them yesterday an email notifying them of our termination). I am truly amazed, and thankful,” he adds.

But those feelings are tempered with a touch of grief, too. “I begin to feel very frustrated, when it comes to looking back and thinking about Startups.com,” Arzuaga says. “Today is a really blue day.”

He also tells us that he put $250,000 into the service and believes the domain name Startups.com is “an awesome asset” to have.  But bad news, folks: the domain name, for now, is not up for grabs…well, not exactly. Arzuage says he doesn’t want to sell the domain, even though he has already had offers in the high six figures should he change his mind.

“We’re looking for an amazing partner to take it to the next level and make it shine,” says Arzuaga of how he wants to now move forward. But given how recent a change this is, he admits he hasn’t had time to really think about things in depth.

As to why he couldn’t make a go of the business, it could have something to do with the “daily deal” model simply not appealing enough to those who would feature their software or services on the site. One company tells us that after the huge discount offered and Startups.com’s 50% commission, their listing, while generating a decent number of orders, was essentially a loss leader for them.

Below, the full text of the goodbye email:

Startups.com Is Closing Up Shop…

Yeah, unfortunately we couldn’t make a go of it. We didn’t achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago. So, with regret, this news of our departure from the realm of Daily Deals. This may be a shocker to some of you and we want you to know that we’re really sorry we failed to achieve your expectations.

It’s Spring and it feels like the right time for us to do some Spring cleaning. We’re evaluating all of the projects we’re working on, (and we’ve got tons, believe me), and unfortunately we had to make the painful decision of shutting down Startups.com as a Daily Deal service.

We’re selling Blinklist.com, and shutting down other sites as well. There’s no point in going on with something just because you’ve been doing it for a certain amount of time. In a startup, as you well know, everything takes up your precious resources. And people’s time and effort is something we can’t afford to waste. We believe this is the right time to pull the plug.

New and fresh ideas need room to grow and for us that means clearing out some of the old ideas which never took off. We wanna thank you, one of our 20,000 loyal subscribers for sticking with us for all this time.

We’re really sorry we couldn’t make it work for you. But hey, life goes on. Best of luck in your endeavors, we shut our doors knowing that we did all we could to help you grow your online business, which was our main goal for launching Startups.com as a Daily Deal site.

To Your Continued Success!

P.S. Reach out to me at gonzo@startups.com with comments, concerns, just to say “Sorry, it was good while it lasted,” or to share your stories about the awesome Deals you got on Startups.com.

Gonzo

Everyone out of the pool! Google is shutting it down. As announced late last year, Google Wave is now in the final stages of its life and became read-only yesterday. Come April 30 the Wave pool will be shut down forever. It was fun while it lasted.

Wave was supposed to be an email killer. For a short time Wave invites were a hot commodity. It was supposed to change communication forever on the Internet. And it did — at least for awhile. But once the novelty wore off, the waves turned from killer to calm. Users turned back to email and Google Docs. Now the pool is empty.

Google announced last November that Wave would be shut down on April 30, 2012. But prior to completely closing the service, Google is giving Wave users time to export their data to a PDF or HTML file — only until April 30th. Sigh. I like Wave.

Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer.

Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.

Plancast was the service conceived a few months later from that basic inclination. Its approach was to provide a really easy way for people to take whatever interesting plans they had in their calendars and share them openly with friends, with the rationale that greater social transparency for this particular type of personal information would facilitate serendipitous get-togethers and enable a greater awareness of relevant events. Personally, I figured that knowing more about the events my friends and peers were attending would lead to a more fulfilling social and professional life because I could join them or at least learn about how they spent their time around town.

Along the way my team built a minimum viable product, launched from obscurity here on TechCrunch, raised a seed round of funding from local venture capitalists and angel investors, and worked like mad to translate our initial success into long-term growth, engagement and monetization.

Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. Over the subsequent year and a half, we struggled to refine the product’s purpose and bolster its central value proposition with better functionality and design, but we were ultimately unable to make it work (with user registration growth and engagement being our two main high-level metrics).

This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. It’s my hope that other product designers can learn a thing or two from our experience, especially if they are designing services that rely on user-generated content. The challenges I describe here apply directly to events, but they can be used collectively as a case study to advance one’s thinking about other content types as well, since all types demand serious analysis along these lines should one seek to design a network that facilitates their exchange.

Sharing Frequency

Social networks (by my general definition and among which I count Plancast) are essentially systems for distributing content among people who care about each other, and the frequency at which its users can share that content on a particular network is critical to how much value it’ll provide them on an ongoing basis.

Unlike other, more frequent content types such as status updates and photos (which can be shared numerous times per day), plans are suitable for only occasional sharing. Most people simply don’t go to that many events, and of those they do attend, many are not anticipated with a high degree of certainty. As a result, users don’t tend to develop a strong daily or weekly habit of contributing content. And the content that does accrue through spontaneous submissions and aggregation from other services is too small to provide most users with a repeatedly compelling experience discovering events.

I run the service, and even I currently have only five upcoming plans listed on my profile, with a total of 500 plans shared over the last couple of years, in contrast to almost 2,800 tweets on Twitter over the same period of time. People often tell me “I like Plancast, but I never have any plans to share”. With social networks, this is sometimes a case of self-awareness (such as when people say they don’t know what to tweet), but often they’re simply telling the truth; many Plancast users don’t have any interesting plans on their calendars.

Consumption Frequency

People also don’t proactively seek out events to attend as you might suppose. I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about people as divided into two camps: those who have lots of free time and those who don’t.

Those who do are often proactive about filling it, in part by seeking out interesting events to attend in advance. They are generally more inquisitive about social opportunities, and they will take concrete steps to discover new opportunities and evaluate them.

Those who don’t have much free time often desire to conserve it, so rather than seeking out or welcoming additional opportunities, they view them as mentally taxing impositions on a limited resource. For them, planning is a higher-risk endeavor, and usually they’d rather not plan anything at all, since if they’re busy, they likely have a preference to keep their free time just that – free.

It’s hard to generalize by saying most people are in one camp or the other, but suffice to say, there are many people in the latter. And for them, it’s hard to get them excited about a service that will give them more options on how to use their time.

Tendency to Procrastinate

Even putting this bifurcation aside, most people resist making advanced commitments before they absolutely need to make them. People fear missing out on worthwhile events but don’t actually like to take the deliberate initiative to avoid such missed chances, which requires planning.

This can be attributed primarily to people’s desire to keep their options open in case other conflicting opportunities emerge as the date and time of an event approaches. If they can afford to wait and see, they will. Therefore, their commitment will be secured and shared in advance only when they’re particularly confident they’ll attend an event, if they need to reserve a spot before it fills up, or if there’s some other similar prerogative.

Incentives to Share

Returning to the topic of sharing plans, it’s not only a matter of having interesting plans to share but being compelled to actually share them. And unfortunately, people don’t submit information to social networks because they love data set integrity or altruistically believe in giving as much as possible. They do it because the act of contribution selfishly results in something for them in return.

Most social networks feed primarily on vanity, in that they allow people to share and tailor online content that makes them look good. They can help people communicate to others that they’ve attended impressive schools, built amazing careers, attended cool parties, dated attractive people, thought deep thoughts, or reared cute kids. The top-level goal for most people is to convince others they are the individuals they want to be, whether that includes being happy, attractive, smart, fun or anything else.

This vanity compels folks to share content about themselves (or things they’ve encountered) most strongly when there’s an audience ready and able to generate validating feedback. When you post a clever photo on Instagram, you’re telling the world “I’m creative!” and sharing evidence to boot. Those who follow you validate that expression by liking the photo and commenting positively about it. The psychological rush of first posting the photo and then receiving positive feedback drives you to post more photos in the hope of subsequent highs.

Sharing plans, unfortunately, doesn’t present the same opportunity to show off and incur the same subsequent happy feelings. Some plans are suitable for widespread consumption and can make a person look good, such as attending an awesome concert or savvy conference. But, frustratingly, the vainest events are exclusive and not appropriate for sharing with others, especially in detail.

The feedback mechanisms aren’t nearly as potent either, since coming up with a worthy comment for an event is harder than commenting on a photo, and “liking” a plan is confusing when there’s also an option to join. The positive feedback of having friends join is itself unlikely since those friends have considerations to make before they can commit, and they’ll tend to defer that commitment for practical purposes, per above.

Additionally, if a user wants to show off the fact they’re at a cool event, there is little additional benefit to doing so before the event rather than simply tweeting or posting photos about it while at the event. An important exception is to be made for professionals who style themselves as influencers and want to be instrumental parts of how their peers discover events. This exception has indeed been responsible for much of our attendee-contributed event data among an early-adopter community of technology professionals.

Selectivity & Privacy Concerns

Vanity, of course, is not the only possible incentive for users to share their plans. There’s also utility to getting others to join you for an event you’ll be attending, but this turns out to be a weak incentive for broadcasting since most people prefer to be rather picky about who they solicit to join them for real-life encounters.

While event promoters have a financial interest in attracting attendees far and wide, the attendees themselves mainly turn to their closer circle of friends and reach out to them individually. You don’t see a lot of longer-tail plans in particular (such as nights out on the town and trips) because people are both wary of party crashers and usually uninterested in sourcing participants from a wide network.

The Importance of an Invitation

On the flip-side of this reluctance to share plans far and wide is the psychological need for people to get personally invited to events.

Plancast and other social event sharing applications are rooted in an idealistic notion that people would feel confident inviting themselves to their friends’ events if only they knew about them. But the informational need here is not only one of event details (such as what’s going to happen, when, where and with whom). People often also need to know through a personal invitation that at least one friend wants them to join.

When you have a service that helps spread personal event information but doesn’t concurrently satisfy that need, you have a situation where many people feel awkwardly aware of events to which they don’t feel welcome. As a result, the most engaging events on Plancast are those that are open in principle and don’t solicit attendees primarily through invitations, such as conferences and concerts, where the attendance of one’s friends and peers is a much less important consideration for their own.

Content Lifespan

Getting content into a social network is not enough to ensure its adequate value; there’s also an importance of preserving that content’s value over time, especially if it just trickles in.

Unfortunately, plans don’t have a long shelf life. Before an event transpires, a user’s plan for it provides social value by notifying others of the opportunity. But afterwards, its value to the network drops precipitously to virtually nothing. And since most users don’t have enough confidence to share most plans more than one or two weeks in advance, plans are typically rendered useless after that length of time.

Contrast this expiration tendency with more “evergreen” content types, such as profiles and photos. Other people can get value out of your Facebook profile for years after you set it up, and the photos you posted in college appear to have even increased in value. Nostalgia doesn’t even have to play a part; people’s hearts will melt upon viewing this puppy on Pinterest, Tumblr, and other visually-heavy content networks for a long time to come. But how much do you care that I attended a tech meetup in New York last October, even if you’re my friend?

Geographic Limitations

Geographic specificity is another inherent limitation to a plan’s value. Unlike virtually all other content types (with the exception of check-ins), plans provide most of their value to others when those users live or can travel near enough to join.

I may share plans for a ton of great events in San Francisco, but few to none of my friends who live outside of the Bay Area are going to care. In fact, they’ll find it annoying to witness something they’ll miss out on. Sure, they might appreciate simply knowing what I’m up to, but the value to that kind of surveillance is rather modest all by itself.

This is especially problematic when trying to expand the service into new locations. New users will have a hard time finding enough local friends who are either on the service and sharing their plans already, or those who are willing to join them on a new service upon invitation. People who encounter the service from non-urban locations have the hardest time, since there aren’t many events going on in their area in general, let alone posted to Plancast. Trying to view all events simply listed within their location or categories of interest yields little for them to enjoy.

Looking Forward

Despite all of these challenges, I still believe someone will eventually figure out how to make and market a viable service that fulfills our aims, namely to help people share and discover events more socially. There’s simply too much unearthed value to knowing about much of what our friends plan to do to leave information about it so restricted to personal calendars and individuals’ heads.

Another startup may come along that develops insight into an angle of attack we missed. Or, perhaps more likely, an established company with an existing event or calendaring product will progressively provide users with a greater ability to share their personal information contained within. On the calendaring side, Google is possibly the best-situated with Google Calendar and Google+, which together could make for a very seamless event sharing experience (one of the things we considered seriously for Plancast was deep personal calendar integration, but a sufficient platform for it simply wasn’t available). On the events side, companies like Eventbrite, Meetup and Facebook have services that are primarily compelling for event organizers but already contain useful data sets that could be leveraged to create their own social event discovery and sharing experiences for attendees.

Plancast managed to attract a niche audience of early adopters who found it to be among the most efficient ways to share and hear about events (thanks, users! you know who you are). Over 100,000 have registered and over 230,000 people visit each month, not to mention enjoy the event digests we send out by email each day. For that reason alone, and despite its growth challenges, we’re going to keep it up and running for as long as possible and are hopeful we’ll find it a home that can turn it into something bigger. It’s my expectation that one day mainstream society will take for granted the type of interpersonal sharing it currently enables for just this small community, and I look forward to seeing how technological advancements overcome the aforementioned challenges to get us there.

San Francisco-based HiGear, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service focused on luxury vehicles, is shutting down due to theft incidents involving its members’ cars. According to CEO Ali Moiz, the company will send out an email tomorrow to its members with a full explanation. The news may come as a shock to some, given that HiGear was seemingly doing so well in recent months. The company had expanded to L.A. in November, and was planning expansions to additional markets, including Portland and San Diego, by year-end.

Unlike other car-sharing services, HiGear specialized in “high-end” auto brands only, like Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Tesla. It provided comprehensive liability and collision insurance and performed member screening, which included driving record checks and credit checks. It also collected a security deposit in order to “encourage safe and fair use of members’ cars.” In additional to the rental fee ($125-600, depending on the car), drivers would pay $20-40 per day in rental insurance.

Back in early 2009, I wrote about an Italian startup called BeeTV, which showcased some impressive TV recommendation technology. The goal was to sell that technology to telcos and cable operators, but this proved to be a very difficult task for a small, scrappy upstart. This led to BeeTV changing course and trying its hand at making consumer-focused products, like an iPad app for watching and sharing TV experiences with friends. They also secured more funding, bringing its total raised to over $10 million.

Alas, this morning CEO Yaniv Solnik informed me that they’ve failed to gain significant traction with the new strategy, and that they’ve subsequently ran out of cash.

The company will be ceasing operations soon.

Solnik also says BeeTV’s main co-founder unexpectedly passed away last year, and that his death was -understandably – a huge shock to everyone at the company.

BeeTV will be shut down, but the company has put its assets up for sale; including a patented recommendation engine for TV and a consumer-focused social TV service that encompasses iPad, iPhone and Web clients. So maybe this isn’t the definitive end of the road for BeeTV.

I told Solnik that this ‘failure’ means he can now move on to the next startup, and he quickly responded to me, saying that he can’t help it and that he will keep trying. Good.

Brandstack. Pitched as some sort of haven for designers, it was a marketplace in which creative types could sell off their logo concepts as they came to mind, rather than on “spec work” conjured up by a client. The goal? Less unpaid work (and fewer “amateur submissions”) than contest-based crowdsourcing sites like 99designs.

Alas, Brandstack is now officially destined for the deadpool — and, according to the founder, it’s all because of credit card fraud.

In the founder’s own words:

Recently, we were hit with significant fraud. If you’re not familiar with this kind of situation, here a simplified summary of what happens: 1. Criminal uses stolen credit cards to purchase legitimate goods (designs); 2. retailer (Brandstack) pays out vendors (designers) for their work; 3. bank sees the fraudulent transactions and takes the money from the retailer; 4. retailer loses the funds paid to vendors, any profits associated with the purchase, and resources used to fight and process the transactions; 5. If the fraud is significant enough, the retailer loses access to accept credit cards. Even shorter summary: the retailer takes all of the liability… I did not have the flexibility or capital to withstand it.

Curiously, it sounds like some designers will inevitably be left out in the cold for deals that were mid-transaction:

As many of you know, there is some unfinished business that won’t be taken care of. Many designers put their faith in Brandstack and were left short.

Anyone with designs stored on Brandstack will need to pull them off by December 1st, at which point the servers will be shuttered. Domains handled through Brandstack (designers could sell domains along with their logo work) have been transferred to ResellerClub, with designers expected to contact them directly to work out the process from here. What a mess.

On the upside, there seems to be no shortage of alternatives. Whether or not the idea is sound, sites like Logopond, Logofaves, Logospire, and countless others continue to work at it.

A reader tells us Yap Voicemail, a mobile voicemail transcription app for iPhone and Android phones, will soon be no more.

Indeed, a message on the Yap Voicemail product page informs users that the service, which converts voicemails into text, thus making it easier to access, search and respond to voicemail messages from a mobile device, will be discontinued on October 20, 2011.

Yap has published a FAQ on the topic, letting AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon users know how to restore the original voicemail service on their phones.

Yap Voicemail users can transfer their voicemail messages one by one by emailing themselves copies, and after the 20th of October, callers will receive a recorded message saying that the person they’re trying to reach no longer has voicemail enabled.

Yap did not say why it is ceasing its Voicemail operations. Similar services are aplenty: check out Google Voice, YouMail, GotVoice, VoiceCloud, VoxSciences and PhoneTag for alternatives.

Yap Voicemail has been added to the TechCrunch deadpool.

Notifo, a YC-backed company we once described as a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything”, is shuttering the windows and heading for the deadpool.

The idea was simple enough: Notifo would pipe real-time notifications from just about anywhere — be it Twitter, or Hacker News, or Github, or Facebook, or any Growl-compatible app on your computer — to your mobile device, long before most of these services had apps that could handle that duty themselves. Later down the road, Notifo doubled down their server’s functionality by tossing in free user-to-user chat.

Alas, the product just never managed to find a userbase.

In a world where just about every service has come to have an app of their very own, a service like Notifo has unfortunately become a bit redundant. Meanwhile, competing alternatives like Boxcar (on the app side) and Urban Airship (on the publisher/server side) have filled in any lingering gaps.

Notifo founder Chad Etzel says he’s already moved on to another job (Update: according to his personal blog, he’s now at Twilio. Congrats, Chad!), while co-founder Paul Stamatiou moved onto PicPlum (which we covered here) a while ago. Notifo will stay functional until the server money runs dry — but from this point on, there will be no further development effort.

So long, Twezr, it’s been fun. The mobile social contacts application Twezr is being shut down after having a fairly well-received launch back in November 2010. The app, for those unaware, was based on a great idea: it was a social address book. It aggregated all the activity from your phone’s contacts (e.g., phone calls, SMS’s, voicemails) alongside their social networking activity (e.g., Facebook and Twitter updates)

Now the company is removing its app from the iTunes App Store and working to build a new location-based photo sharing app called Spotpix instead.

Says the company, Spotpix “has a great potential to solve some real world problems.” That’s probably a bit much, considering that the app seems to just involve geo-tagging photos so you can remember the places you’ve been. Yep, never seen that before.

Sadly, Twezr was actually the more promising of the two concepts. By combining a contact’s phone-based activity alongside social updates, it could function as sort of a social CRM for everyday users.

So what went wrong? Well, for starters, at launch, the app didn’t use OAuth standards to gain access to your social services, and actually asked users for their Gmail, Facebook and Twitter passwords. That’s a big no-no. Also, from personal experience, the app struggled to load large address books. It crashed, too.

Maybe solving the real, ”real world problem” of building the next great social address book (I’ve yet to find an app that really shines here, although Friends came close), was too much for a small team. Photo-sharing may be more Twezr’s speed.

Here’s the letter Twezer emailed its users:

Dear Twezr User, 

Over the past few months we’ve been developing Spotpix, a very interesting location based photo sharing app. Spotpix has a great potential to solve some real world problems. As we’re a small startup with limited resources, we’ve decided to focus on Spotpix and withdraw Twezr from the app store and shut down Twezr service over the next few days. We regret the inconvenience. We hope you’ll find another personal organizer app that closely matches your needs to replace Twezr or switch back to the native apps. 

We hope you’ll try out Spotpix when we launch. You can sign up for early access (http://spotpix.me) and also follow Spotpix on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/spotpixapp) to stay tuned. 

Sincerely, 

Team Twezr 

MyNines, a startup that made its debut back in 2009, has gone belly up. The company, which we likened to a ‘Kayak for private sales’, wasn’t able to secure the financing needed to sustain the business.

MyNines aimed to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites by aggregating products for sale and offering users the ability to search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed.

We received an email from CEO and cofounder Apar Kothari, who has moved on a VP role at private sale shopping destination site Rue La La, where she will be heading up business development and strategic partnerships.

Writes Kothari, who was previously manager of corporate development at Fox Interactive Media:

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

After an incredible two years chasing my dreams as CEO/Cofounder of MyNines, I’m thrilled to continue the next phase of my techfashion career as Head of New Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at Rue La La.

While MyNines embodied the perfect blend of my passion for fashion & entrepreneurship, I didn’t have the resources to scale it. I’m super-excited to not only leverage the assets I acquired at MyNines, but also to work with a rockstar exec team at RLL.

I’ve learned a ton & my deep experience in the flash sale/fashion world provides the optimal springboard to identify game-changing opportunities for RLL.

Kothari will be based in Rue La La’s New York office.

MyNines, which is now offline, was originally founded in 2009 and raised $500,000 in seed funding.

We’ve added the startup to the TechCrunch deadpool.

It wasn’t even a month ago when we broke the news that beRecruited would be acquiring former Y Combinator startup Fanvibe. At the time, Fanvibe’s Vishwas Prabhakara, set to become the new CEO of beRecruited with the deal, said that Fanvibe would continue to operate with its roughly 100,000 users. What a difference a few weeks make.

Effective immediately, Fanvibe will cease operations, Prabhakara confirms. Why the sudden change of heart? The ongoing NFL and NBA lockouts have effectively destroyed the point of the service, Prabhakara says.

While the NFL lockout has been rumored to be ending for weeks now, it still continues on (once again, a deal is rumored to happen later this week — don’t hold your breath). Meanwhile, the NBA lockout shows no signs of ending, and it definitely could wipe out at least a part of the upcoming season. The threat of no games in the upcoming months was simply too much for beRecruited, so they made the call to pull the plug.

When I noted the constant rumors of the NFL lockout ending, Prabhakara says it has already taken too big of a toll. Apparently, a number of the NFL’s digital staffers were laid off or have left during the lockout. “They are now way behind on the digital stuff,” Prabhakara says, also noting that their main contact left to become the head of sports and entertainment marketing at JP Morgan Chase.

This turn of events serves as an interesting reminder that outside variables can quickly destroy a startup. Of course, Fanvibe was fortunate to sell itself in time (perhaps not coincidentally — but Prabhakara assures me this “wasn’t our plan”).

“We’re going to put our focus on the growth of beRecruited for the the near future, while leveraging some of the backend stuff we built for Fanvibe,” Prabakara says.

Update: Says the NFL:

We are not laying off people. In fact, NFL.com is hiring and getting prepared for the 2011 NFL season. Prabhakara’s comments about us that were from his contact that is no longer at the NFL.

Companies, like visitors of Chinese take-away restaurants, come and go. Today, we have the unfortunate duty to report that two fine young Internet startups have not survived the never-ending battle for users, relevance and dollars that rages Web-wide.

Making its way to the deadpool are JamLegend, which aimed to compete against Rock Band and Guitar Hero with an interesting online music game, and Skribit, which hoped to help out poor bloggers and website owners suffering from writer’s block.

JamLegend was one of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator back in 2008, and quickly attracted 1 million members (and has grown on to about 2 million registered users over the years).

As of yesterday, the following features were turned off: new user registrations, new artist registrations, JamCash deposits, new VIP subscriptions, and VIP subscription extensions. On April 29, the service will be completely shut down and all user data deleted.

Why, you ask? Well, according to a blog post, the team is moving on to unknown new ventures after three years of trying to make JamLegend rock the market.

JamLegend had raised more than $2 million in funding, in part from one of its advisors, entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, cofounder of Tellme and iLike and former Myspace exec.

Skribit was an interesting idea as well, although it enjoyed much less traction than JamLegend, as the above tweet shows. Skribit originally came out of the Atlanta Startup Weekend organized in November 2007.

The service aimed to help prevent writer’s block by allowing bloggers and website publishers to get post suggestions straight from their readers, while at the same time helping readers keep track of what their favorite bloggers were cooking.

This is the email the startup sent its users today:

[Notice: This is the last email you'll ever receive regarding Skribit. I will personally nuke the 20,621 user email list. - @Stammy]

On July 31st, 2011, Skribit will be closing its doors. Skribit started several years ago at Atlanta Startup Weekend in November 2007 and has had a good run. As a refresher, Skribit aimed to aid writer’s block by allowing bloggers to receive post suggestions from their readers, while helping readers keep track of what their favorite blogger’s were working on.

Unfortunately, Skribit traction was not as impressive as we had hoped and Skribit had become more of a niche solution for a small percentage of bloggers. Over the past few years, 45,162 blog post suggestions have been completed through Skribit, 2,346 of which were completed/blogged. The vast majority of Skribit users did not receive suggestions from their readers for various reasons.

Only 1,214 blogs had more than 3 active suggestions.

We stopped actively developing Skribit last Spring and decided to pursue other opportunities. Thanks for being part of Skribit! We are in the process of refunding current PRO users. We wouldn’t have been able to keep Skribit running for so long if it wasn’t for a seed investment from Georgia Tech’s Edison Fund and lots of advising from Lance Weatherby of the Georgia Tech ATDC.

Follow us on Twitter to see what we’re working on now!

Best,
Calvin, Paul & Lance

Google just sent out an email to users who have previously uploaded content to the service informing them that on April 29 2011, the site will no longer host any more videos. Users are being encouraged to download and reupload their files to YouTube. The news was first reported yesterday by CenterNetworks.

Google actually stopped allowing uploads to Google Video back in May 2009, but existing videos have played fine until now. The news will likely frustrate some people, as Google’s help page assured users that while uploads were being disabled, their content “would remain hosted by Google Video”.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. Google Video launched back in 2005 — you originally had to upload footage using a desktop client instead of a web form — and was selling premium content as early as January 2006. But rival site YouTube came out of nowhere to become a viral phenomenon, which prompted Google to acquire it in October 2006.

We’re adding Google Video to the deadpool, though the service still lives on (if only in logo) as Google’s search engine for video at video.google.com.

Here’s the letter that’s being sent out:

Dear Google Video User,

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here.

Here’s how to download your videos:

Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.

Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team

Going will be “going away” (they made the joke, not me) on May 1, 2011. The reason? “AOL’s refocusing”, the team explains in an email sent to users today.

We’ve previously covered Going a number of times over the years. More recently, AOL had turned it into a new-style check-in service that focused on events (odd given that earlier today, Facebook unveiled an app update that does the same basic thing). At the time, Foursquare was starting to get some buzz, but it was far from clear who the winner in the space would be. We can definitely say now that it will not be Going.

You’ll be able to grab you information off of Going before the May deadline. After that, going.com will apparently be part of both Moviefone and Patch somehow.

Below, find the email sent out:

First off, we’d like to thank you and the Going community for your support and your feedback over the years. With your contributions we built a very special site that has helped make the city a place to live in to the fullest and has gotten the word out about thousands of great local happenings, artists, and places. We can’t thank you enough!

As part of AOL’s refocusing, Going will be going away as of Sunday, May 1st, 2011.

We wanted to give you as much notice as possible so that you can grab anything you’ve contributed ahead of that date. Please save out any of your messages, events, photos, profile information and other personal content you’d like before May 1st.

After that date, Going.com will have a new home in Moviefone and Patch which have movie and event listings at a national level.

Hopefully that will ease the transition and help you continue to discover great things to do around town!

Please note that the Going mobile site and iPhone and Facebook applications will be discontinued as well.

Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions, and thanks again.

Sincerely, Roy Rodenstein, Going co-Founder, and the Going Team

When Twitter bought Mixer Labs in December, 2009, it inherited the startup’s then-recently launched GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo apps. The GeoAPI combined a places database of 16 million businesses with a reverse-geo-coder and support for geo-coded Tweets, Flickr photos, and even an iPhone SDK. Twitter kept the GeoAPI going after the acquisition—but that ends at the end of March.

According to a developer who used to build his product on the GeoAPI, Twitter is shutting it down for outside developers. It is too much of a hassle to maintain, apparently. Twitter will still use it internally for its own apps. (Note that this GeoAPI is not the same as Twitter’s more limited Geotagging API, which is still fully functional). So far no announcement on this. It’s going in the deadpool. I’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment.

Of course, Twitter has no obligation to keep maintaining the API. But the shutdown may be taken by developers as yet another sign that Twitter is not to be relied upon, and doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Oh well, there still SimpleGeo and Factual.

Update: Originally I reported that the GeoAPI was shut down yesterday but Twitter just got back to me and clarified that it will shut down on March 31. Twitter also says it already migrated most of the functionality over to the Twitter API, but the developer I spoke to decided to swap it out for a competing API because of the lack of support. If you are a geo developer, what do you think? Is Twitter API as good as the old GeoAPI or competing geo APIs? Enlighten us in comments.

Here is the email Twitter sent to developers last December:

Hi everyone,

The core functionality and commonly used endpoints of GeoAPI.com have already been migrated to the Twitter API, and many are in use on twitter.com today.

Our data shows that the features we have migrated to the Twitter API cover all but a handful of developers. With that, we want to let you know that the GeoAPI will be turned off on March 31, 2011.

If you are still using the GeoAPI, we encourage you to move to the Twitter APIs at your earliest opportunity. To help you do this we have:
1. Matched GeoAPI place IDs with Twitter place IDs, allowing you to continue to query Twitter with the IDs you already know.
2. Documented the Twitter APIs on the Twitter Developer Resources site:
http://dev.twitter.com/doc/geo

If you have any questions about Geo in the Twitter API you can ask our Developer Advocates and Community through the Twitter Developer mailing list. You can join the mailing list through Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/topics

We thank you for having used GeoAPI.com to power places in your service.

It can be easy to forget that despite the early success stories (or irrational hype, depending on how you perceive it), there are many more startups out there that aren’t taking off for one reason or another. And one of the earlier players in this latest wave, Treehouse, is sadly no more. The service has entered the Deadpool.

We first covered Treehouse in June of last year as perhaps the perfect app for capturing “bros icing bros”. And while it lasted longer than that trend, Treehouse is now shut down, co-founder Chrys Bader has confirmed to us.

But it’s not all sad news. One of the reasons Bader decided to shutter the service now is because he got recruited by Google to help them build out whatever it is they’re building in the social space. Bader declined to give details, but says he’s leading an “exciting new project” alongside the Slide team that Google acquired last August.

“I’m really excited about working with some proven entrepreneurs and to see what we’ll be able to accomplish as a small team within Google,” he says.

Treehouse was technically a part of Fliggo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that had originally set out to be one of the “Twitter for video” plays. They had also been known as Vidly. But Bader correctly predicted that mobile photo sharing was poised to take off, and thus we got Treehouse. The service was well executed, and had an interesting sharing model that was sort of a hybrid of Path and Instagram. But again, for whatever reason, it just didn’t catch on in the same way.

Perhaps Bader will be able translate some of what he learned in the space to whatever Google releases.

Update: In an email, Bader had a bit more to share, looking back on Treehouse and the overall space:

We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing.  It all started when we asked the question “What if you could see your friends’ camera rolls?” So many people take pictures on their iPhones that never see the light of day, so by being able to see your friends’ camera rolls, then you can see what your friends are up to.

At first, we decided to focus on privacy and creating a comfortable environment for people to share photos without worrying who sees them. Initially we had great traction in small groups, but quickly reached the realization that private sharing is difficult in groups of friends that do not all have iPhones.  This is a problem that Path is facing right now. Hyper-privacy does not work and moves against the natural motion of social products now, which is to be more open.

I’m happy to see Instagram’s success because it will bring forward the possibility of mobile photo sharing in people’s minds which will pave the way for new apps to have a chance to blow the lid off of the space.  We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of the mobile photo space, and I’m excited to see Instagram lock-down a long-term vision and watch Path slowly become more open.

Social calendaring service Mixin will soon be no more. In an email to its users, the Swiss startup has announced that the service, which was launched back in 2008, will be unceremoniously shut down on the 18th of February due to lack of significant revenues.

All data will be deleted, although users are given the opportunity to export their current agenda items.

We’re putting Mixin in the deadpool, although the team is still happy to talk to potential buyers. You can find out how to contact them, should you be interested, in the email.

Dear mixin user,

Just letting you know that mixin will close on the 18th of February. We’d like to thank you for your support since we launched the product in 2008.

Why?

To be very transparent, although the product received a warm welcome when we launched, we’ve found it hard to generate sufficient revenue to operate the business.

We know you really liked our many features. We also got a lot of interest in our offer for professionals, but even with this we have to step down.

What’s next for mixin?

mixin is for sale, the complete django-facebook-twitter platform with all brands and domains (mixin.com, mix.in). If you have any idea who could be interested or are interested yourself, please send us an email to mixinisforsale@gmail.com

What’s next for you?

Don’t worry, we will delete all agendas when we shut down the service. In between if you want to extract your current events, go to your agenda and click on “subscribe to your feeds” to view all export options. If you like the idea of social agenda and want to continue using a good one, we invite you to use the great Plancast from our friend Mark.

All the best for 2011,
The mixin team

The company has raised $6 million in venture capital – all of it prior to 2008 – plus another million dollars or so in debt from Western Technology Investment.

The company has been trying to raise a new round of venture capital and almost succeeded in early 2010, sources say, but for a variety of reasons the deal never closed. Facebook was also close to acquiring the company in the Summer, say multiple sources. The deal, like many other Facebook acquisitions, would have given investors some of their capital back, with lucrative stock-based compensation going to founders and employees.

But that deal fell through too.

With no new investors at hand and a couple of competitors like Click Forensics executing extremely well, the company’s investors and creditors made a hard decision, say our sources – shut things down and sell off the assets. WTI should have its debt repaid and there may be some additional proceeds to divide up among investors.

CEO Ken Miller has also left the company, we’ve confirmed. We’re putting Anchor Intelligence into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Another major magazine will stop printing its editions and move completely online. U.S. News & World Report, the USA Today of weekly news magazines, will no longer be found on subscriber’s mailboxes after its December issue. According to an employee memo obtained by Poynter Online’s Romeneso blog, subscribers will no longer get print issues.

Instead, U.S. News & World Report will focus all of its efforts on its Website, and on occasional print issues sold at newsstands for its annual lists and guides, including Best Colleges. Those tend to sell well. But the main thrust going forward will be on the Web and digital products. From the memo:

All of us at U.S. News Media Group have been aggressively responding to the changing habits in the media marketplace, and these latest moves will accelerate our ability to grow our online businesses and position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging platforms for distributing information such as the iPad and Android tablets.

U.S. News joins hundreds of other magazines in the magazine deadpool.