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.

Nambu Network, the company behind tr.im, pic.im, and the Nambu social application for Mac OS and iPhone has announced that tr.im will no longer be shortening URL’s for the public. According to a blog post, the reason behind the decision is Twitter’s decision to use bit.ly for their URL shortening, as well as the cost for servers and development while there are many other solutions for URL shortening.

Nambu Networks will now focus it’s attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.

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):

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)