Back in 2007 I did a column on TBD, a social network aimed at baby boomers. I’d spent some time looking at the space, and thought TBD was the best designed site, avoiding Eons age restrictions and fascination with death and building something a bit broader than Gather. The site borrowed heavily from what worked on sites like Yelp and Facebook, the design was delightful and it gave you fun, addictive get-to-know-me activities. I was also incredibly impressed by its founder Robin Wolaner.

But there was still a central question: Would a social network aimed at baby boomers appeal to the demographic? As it turned out, no. The site is shutting down. Below is the letter to users from Wolaner. (Pictured)

At the beginning of last year, Yahoo made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the papers were signed, the company acquired the startup for approximately $160 million. At the time, the press release touted the acquisition to lead to an expansion of the “state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Now we’ve learned Yahoo is going to kill Maven Networks instead, the most recent in a long series of deadpooling of products and services by the Sunnyvale Internet behemoth. (also see update)

So much for zipping through airport security for people willing to pay $199 per year and have their fingerprints and iris images scanned to be pre-approved.

Clear, the largest company to leverage the Registered Traveler program in the U.S., has “ceased operation” as of 11 pm PST today and their parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., is in the deadpool. They were “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” Users were notified this evening by email.

The service was popular - it was used 250,000 times at Washington, DC airports alone. Overall, the company said, over 2.5 million people were processed using Clear. It operated security lanes at 20 U.S. airports: Albany, Atlanta, Boston’s Logan, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York JFK, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Reno, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C.’s Reagan and Dulles, and Westchester.

One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.

Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering:

Well, this is a bummer. Flowgram, a promising startup that launched last July, is a goner.

The service let users create screencasts with live websites, and the early beta users really liked it:

What you see above is not a video or a slide show, it is a Flowgram. If you click on it, you will be taken to a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget like the one above, which is muted and requires you to click through for the full experience.

But this evening founder Abhay Parekh sent an email out to users letting them know that the service would be closed by the end of June (in fact it’s dead now):

Great idea, good execution, reasonable traction, no future. That’s what it boils down to with the latest entry to the deadpool: Totlol, a video destination site that aggregates the best videos suitable for kids from YouTube with the help of a community of parents and toddlers, is closing down. When Erick reviewed the service back in November 2008, he deemed the service an impressive alternative to traditional Saturday morning TV cartoon watching and “children’s Web video for the children of the YouTube generation”.

Unfortunately, while the initiative clearly struck a chord with thousands of parents and their kids, one-man company / Totlol developer Ron Ilan sees no future for the website:

(after the jump)

The allure of building a business around user-generated content is fading fast. SplashCast, a company which launched two years ago around the notion of helping consumers put together videos, text, graphics, and music in embeddable broadcast “channels,” is discontinuing its original product. “Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave,” concludes CEO Michael Berkley.

And after failing to raise a B round of funding, he is now trying to sell the company. Instead of trying to make money off of user-generated broadcast channels, he is focusing on his newer Social TV product, which adds social features such as chat, commenting, and polling to professionally-produced videos.

The SplashCast product being discontinued was simply too complicated for most consumers. It was a full content-management system which allowed consumers to bring together videos with images, text, and sound. In a candid assessment of why it fell flat, Berkley says: “We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”

In April we reported that San Francisco based mobile startup Kadoink was heading towards the deadpool. Not because they ran out of money, but because Hercules Technology Growth Capital, one of their backers, had seized the company and was shutting it down.

CEO Scott Cahill confirmed the shutdown yesterday in an email to investors, saying that Hercules had “foreclosed on its collateral and has sold the company’s intellectual property to a third party”:

Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now “officially out of business” and winding down.

From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages:

Yahoo 360, which was supposed to close early last year, is finally officially shutting its doors on July 13, according to a blog post written on the site today. The social network/blogging service that nobody really used (except in Vietnam) steadily lost its steam, especially in the U.S. According to ComScore, Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April. But only 982,000 of those unique visitors were from the U.S. This is down from 1.8 million unique U.S. visitors a year ago (see chart below).

Trusera, a health 2.0 community where users can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions, is officially closing its doors on May 27, according to a blog post on the site. We originally reported on Trusera’s possible shutdown in March, when the startup was nearly out of money.

Founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, Trusera launched almost a year ago. Trusera sought to bring users together who were suffering from similar health conditions. The site also took other personal information into account when connecting people, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Trusera would then match people up according to all of these factors and allowed users to receive email updates whenever a new match submitted a story or tip, which meant that users didn’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information.

Okay, this one took a little longer than I predicted, but VOIP service Foonz is suspending its service. More than a year ago, its chief marketing officer decided to shift focus to another startup. That wasn’t a good sign. Foonz has been using up its minutes since then.

Today, its users received the following notice that the service is being suspended:

In news that should come as a surprise to no one, troubled news aggregation site Tailrank is officially headed to the Deadpool, as its parent company looks to sell off its assets. The company behind the site has decided to cut its losses and to concentrate its efforts on Spinn3r, the platform used to power Tailrank that allows researchers and developers to tap into the service’s volumes of blog data. In the wake of Tailrank’s demise, Spinn3r is announcing a major upgrade today, which includes a new backend, architecture, and revamped user interface.

Tailrank launched in late 2005 as an automated news aggregator looking to compete with the likes of Techmeme and a handful of competitors. By mid-2007 it became clear that few people were actually using the site, after it took weeks before anyone noticed that its technology section had gone blank (which prompted us to question if the site should have been placed in the Deadpool). A product upgrade a few months later didn’t do much to help the site gain traction, and visitors to the site now see an error message.

Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio, two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other industries, but as Wall Street cratered nobody wanted to read those stories anymore. The drop in print advertising, down 26 percent in the first quarter, didn’t help matters either.

Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.

GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.

Kadoink, a text messaging marketing startup based in San Francisco, has been seized by creditor Hercules Technology Growth Capital after failing to maintain the financial requirements of a $2.5 million line of credit. CEO Scott Cahill says that there is still a “substantial amount of cash remaining” that is being returned to Hercules, and that they are looking for a strategic buyer to keep the service alive.

The company has announced just $5 million in funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, but they may have burned through substantially more than that. There was rumored to be a previous angel round of nearly $2 million, and the founders took $3 million or so off the table in 2008. Sutter Hill may also have bridged the company an additional $2 million Along with the venture debt, the company may have raised as much as $14 million in capital. At this point, all equity holders other than the cashed-out founders are wiped out.

The startup provided text messaging based marketing services on behalf of brands, similar to competitor Mozes. We’ve added it to the deadpool.

TV advertising startup Spot Runner really is running on fumes. According to a lawsuit filed by one its irate investors, advertising giant WPP, Spot Runner has “expended all but approximately $20 million of its investor capital, while losing money at the rate of $35-$45 million a year.” The company has raised $100 million since 2006, and at one point employed more than 500 people before a string of layoffs cut that number down significantly.

The lawsuit states that the company had a loss of $45 million in fiscal 2008, on revenues of only $9 million. And in fiscal 2007, it lost $35 million on revenues of $5 million.

And here’s the zinger. While Spot Runner was losing all that money, its founders and two early investors (Index Ventures and Battery Ventures) sold shares worth $54 million. CEO and founder Nick Grouf took the lion’s share of those proceeds, netting $26.7 million in five transactions between Feb/March, 2006 and March, 2008. Battery and Index each sold $11.7 million worth of shares (nearly doubling their initial investments of $6 million each). While co-founder David Waxman walked away with only $3.6 million and investor Bob Pittman $365,000 worth of shares. The main complaint of the lawsuit states:

Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.”

Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. From an email they sent out to users today:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

AOL’s Propeller launched in 2006 as a “Digg Killer” - a Digg like site with editorial oversight that had massive netscape.com traffic directed to it. All those Netscape users were used to seeing a standard news page, though, and didn’t quite know what to do at the new site.

A variety of changes were made over time, including paying news submitters to lure them from Digg, changing the name to Propeller.com, and occasional layoffs. They even added a mascot. But nothing has stopped the decline of the site, and now AOL is appealing to previous users to come and give it another try.

A year ago 4.6 million people a month visited the site (Comscore worldwide). Now its 2.1 million, more than a 50% decline in unique visitors. Page views have also dropped by 50%, to just 6 million/month. Revenue is likely in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at best, meaning that it is almost certainly costing AOL money to keep the lights on at the site.

It’s pretty clear that Propeller is a candidate to enter the deadpool, although the upside is the people working on it could go to more interesting projects at AOL. But they’re not giving up just yet. In an email to registered users who haven’t signed in recently (that would be me), Propeller General Manager Tom Drapeau said:

When SMS reminder service Kwiry launched back in December, 2007, I wondered whether anyone would use it. We now have our answer: not enough people to keep it going. The company sent out a notice today to users, also on its Website, that it will be shutting down on April 23, 2009.

Kwiry allowed you to text a keyword from your phone and get back an email with links to search results for that keyword. It was supposed to be a simple way to remind yourself of things. Later, it expanded to other ways to use SMS, such as to update your Netflix movie lineup. But it didn’t really solve a pressing problem. There are easier ways to remind yourself of something than sending yourself a search results page via clunky SMS. The bigger issue I think was that these reminders were for yourself instead of being aimed at other people. People don’t want to talk to themselves, they want to talk to other people, which is why communication-based services always have an easier time gaining traction.