There’s currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse’s services for the past couple of days. We’ve been getting tips about this since last Thursday, and tried contacting founder & CEO Brad Greenspan (also the founder of MySpace) for an explanation to no avail.
Pingdom caught the fact that the light has gone out for the websites Revver (which we’ve declared dead or at least struggling for life before), LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes, but missed other unreachable properties such as Peerflix. The only websites that seem to be holding up for the time being are LiveVideo, Yikers, Glumbert and MeeVee, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for those to stay online for much longer either.
Update: per comment below, PageFlakes is back, may I suggest you back up your data if you’re an active user?
Update 2: Revver’s back too, with a message saying that they’ll be down 5PM PST January 28 but they’ll be back up in the evening. We now know that didn’t happen.
Last Friday, CNET got in touch with Greenspan who said the downtime was simply a part of migration to a new data center in LA that has “lots of servers”. He added that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.
They didn’t, and they most probably won’t. We’ve heard that “migration” story from Greenspan before, and it turned out to be equally bogus then. And although Greenspan hasn’t gotten back to us yet regarding the most recent downtime problems, we’ve heard from multiple sources – including someone who has sold his company to Greenspan in the past – that LiveUniverse has simply run out of money and imploded, which isn’t much of a surprise to us.
For more proof, see this Twitter message from a laid off employee), read this detailed story from yet another person who sold his company to Peerflix / LiveUniverse or turn to the gripes of people owed money.
As far as we’ve concerned, LiveUniverse is in the deadpool.
Screw LiveUniverse. They bought one of my favourite sites themovieblog.com and failed to pay their vages. It cripled them for a while but they have moved on and hopefully liveuniverse burns in hell for what they have done.
Pageflakes is BACK UP. I’ve just logged in and it’s working. No comments in their forums, blog or press centre however.
My advice – copy your information asap, move it to another resource and run like the wind!
Thanks, post updated.
where is there social network myspac redemption site. isnt that what its all about?
it’s funny how your headline could be changed to fit pretty much all of the companies that you’ve covered here at techcrunch…including tech crunch itself.
Revver is now online!! http://www.revver.com
With a message saying that they’ll be back up Friday night last week
Updated post.
Brad Greenspan tried to buy our gaming company in 2004 when he was still at eUniverse (before they were acquired by News Corp.). Had several phone call with them and his management team. They were SLIMELY. Felt like I was talking to a user car salesman.
guy brad got too rich on myspace and doesnt give a wit about this business. this is a classic story—we saw it in internet 1.0. this puppy is dead.
i wouldn’t give up on them so easily. Seems like they are just having some organizational hiccups.
These stories frighten me. Is the the credit crunch responsible for these collapses?
Hello PageFlakes users —
I’d love to know what keeps you using this “flakey” service as opposed to a venerable, reliable service like My Yahoo!, or even our #1 competitor, iGoogle.
Regards,
–james
James Kittock
Product Lead, My Yahoo!
James – I am avid PageFlakes user. I used to be a user of MyYahoo!, but I was worried about Yahoo!’s stability and wanted to go with a more stable company, such as eUniverse. Regards,
James: that’s easy:
1) My Yahoo wasn’t open for using other people’s widgets and services (has improved but not enough)
2) You take too long to implement new features and keep up with the industry
3) I’m not sure that Yahoo is that venerable any more – my and others’ perception is that Yahoo continues to be in trouble, will get sold and/or chopped up, and perhaps even you might lose your job
About 2 years ago, when I worked there I made a export feature ( never got the time to make import and I am not sure if that feature was announced) that saves the user’s settings as xml. I don’t think other start pages yet have a way to import that file.
Login to your account. Then hit this url
http://www.page...portmypage.aspx
That would let you download your page settings and all widget related setting to harddrive. But I am sorry to say that won’t be useful without any other site importing those.
“We’ve heard that “migration” story from Greenspan before, and it turned out to be equally bogus then.”
Sounds like someone is trying to pull a “Cubrilovic” on us.
I’ve heard that there are multiple lawsuits filed against this company and that the number of creditors is very high
I used to work at Revver – it’s very sad what happened to our team. Regardless of the negative comments posted here over the years, Revver was a pretty amazing place to work. I’d be surprised if you don’t see something big in the future from some one of the Revver alumni. We were a pretty brilliantly talented team.
“We were a pretty brilliantly talented team.”
Including yourself I suppose.
strange days at LU it seems.
I know for a fact it was a migration operation.
LOL
How many people (besides me) does Live Universe owe money to?