The announcement came from longtime tech reviewer and moderator Charles Jefferies. As he reminisces over the rise and fall of NotebookReview and her sister sites, which have today only been reduced to unfrequented forums, he implores what remains of the once strong gearhead community to decide on what platform to migrate to in their exodus.

On behalf of the small but dedicated volunteer staff here, we wish you the best. We wish we could send you off a little more gracefully. Please enjoy the remaining time.

Best,
Charles Jefferies & the NBR Moderation Team

So without further ado, a complete list of sites closing down in the TechnologyGuide network are as follows:

• NotebookReview: a site dedicated to laptop news and reviews.
• TabletPCReview: tablet and pc reviews!
• Brighthand: smartphones and smartdevices.
• DigitalCameraReview: camera reviews, as well as tips for photography and editing.
• TechnologyGuide: the nexus of the network, TechnologyGuide had a little bit of everything from all the other sites, and then some.
• DesktopReview: now-defunct Desktop review site, which had already been absorbed into NotebookReview. Likewise, for PrinterComparison and its archive.

It should also be noted that Archive Team has been made aware of the situation as well. Yet we are not aware of any archivebot/grab-site grabs at this time. Be sure to comment or reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any archives you would like to share, and to stay tuned to catch up on any updates.

Back in July of this year, they removed a lot partner courses developed in collaboration with other organizations or educational institutions. These included Math & Science courses in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences and the Stanford School of Medicine, and Arts & Humanities courses in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History .

Except it’s not just partner courses, Khan Academy has also removed a lot of test prep courses, with MCAT to soon join these retired courses in 2021, only extended due to popular demand.

But why now? Why when online education is more crucial than ever, due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic? It’s safe to assume that this might be due to partnership deals expiring, but Khan Academy gives us a more fundamental reason: being out of focus.

Khan Academy is retiring some content that isn’t aligned to our focus on Kindergarten through early college (K-14) core academic courses and select tests. 

…

Over the last few years we’ve been deepening our focus on core academic content and seen usage of that content grow considerably. By retiring content that is outside this focus area, our team will be able to devote more care and energy to maintaining and improving this highly utilized content. 

The page goes onto mention how Khan Academy is a relatively small non-profit organization and as such they need to make the most of what little resources they have. Yet the decision to remove these courses isn’t due to hosting costs, so much as maintenance. Khan Academy hosts a good deal of the course videos on their YouTube channels, for no cost. The cost arises from the fact that they feel obligated to respond to comments, to try and answer any questions, to listen to feedback so long as these videos are still up. As such, they have taken this decision to reduce their opportunity cost here by focussing on core topics, which they believe students need more.

Discontinuing online courses is nothing new, big MOOCs such as Udemy and Udacity have also retired a sizable chunk of their earlier courses for similar reasons. At the very least, Khan Academy’s support page offers alternatives for students who might be affected by the removal of a particular course, which is definitely a step in the right direction we should hope more educational platforms to follow.

What is disheartening however, is seeing how these massive online platforms are financially struggling when more students depend on them than ever before. During these past few months serious investments have been made to improve remote education, yet counterintuitively funds are being funneled into accelerating digital transformation for more traditional institutions or to expand the educational services of various companies, instead of supporting these already mature platforms.

Recently the World Bank approved a $160 million loan to Turkey, for the country to be able to improve the infrastructure of their national online education services and accessibility to said services. Education companies who are not primarily focussed on online teaching such as Chegg, a company instead more focussed on textbooks which also just so happens to offer limited online tutoring, have seen their stock value go up significantly. While these investments are bringing genuine improvements in educational infrastructure and extending outreach to more students, it really is a shame that investors and donors aren’t as keen on funding platforms which have already been doing this for the past decade.

If there is a silver lining to this story, it’s that there are people who see the merit in Khan Academy and other such online platforms: students and volunteers. Where schools, teachers, governments and investors still fear to tread, the generation who grew up with MOOCs are starting their own educational platforms.

One such second generation project is Kolibri, an NPO which aims to make online resources (such as those from Khan Academy) available offline in regions which don’t have stable access to internet. As a bonus, it doubles as an archive in the event that those courses are no longer accessible online.

So as the saying goes: When one door closes, another opens. And that doesn’t just apply for Khan Academy who have closed one door to open another, but to all of us through available alternatives just waiting to be found out!

This last September stands as a testament to that fact as many websites, which might have been stars in their days, have silently shut down. To digital archivists seeking to preserve internet history, this has been quite the field day. A lot of these archiving projects were led by the Archive Team. What follows is a sample of those stories…

Tencent Weibo (腾讯微博) was a microblogging social media similar to Twitter. It launched about a decade ago, and for a time Tencent and Sina competed for social media domination throughout the Sinosphere. At their peak, both Tencent and Sina’s Weibo had over 200 million users. But Tencent really struck gold with their mobile app WeChat, which originally started as an instant-messenger but later received social media features such as groups, subscriptions and payments. And today they’ve become one of the biggest tech companies in China.

In the end, seeing as WeChat had both outclassed Sina’s and their own Weibo, Tencent decided to put it to rest in hopes of “reorganizing their company” to presumably focus on WeChat and other products. The shutdown announcement, which came in early September, gave users about three weeks to back up their data before the website would close down for good. Archive Team rushed to archive whatever they could, seeing as this was once a massively active website it’s no surprise that their collection is massive!

Archiving Stats (248.36TB), Collection on the Internet Archive

Naver Matome (まとめ) was a “curation platform”, akin to a tumblelog. Matome is short for Matomeru, which can be translated as “compiling” or “curating”. Launched in 2009 by Naver’s Japanese subsidiary LINE, Naver Matome allowed users to curate information into news stories or mini-articles. After peeking in popularity around 2013, it slowly faded into obscurity.

The company’s vision was to be able to tie these curations into Naver’s search engine, so that instead of just a website and its title, people searching would be able to view a summary of information, a similar function to how Wikipedia and Medium, to a certain extent, complement other search engines today. Alas, finding it difficult to grow in the current service and market environments they have decided to close their website down. With LINE’s recent merger with Yahoo Japan, it’s predicable that much corporate restructuring is to follow. The shutdown announcement came in July, giving users time until late September to say goodbye.

Archive Team was a bit late in initiating their archiving project, but they were able to salvage quite a bit of the website.

Archiving Stats (2.29 TB), Collection on the Internet Archive

Ever (or Ever album) was an online photo hosting service, which allowed users to store and organize their photos privately. In an age where smartphones were all the rage, and people had more photos on their hands than they could handle it enjoyed a small following.

Ironically, Ever wasn’t meant to last forever.

It is with heavy hearts that we plan to shut down the Ever service on August 31, 2020.  The service has been around for over seven years, but with increasing competition over the last several years from Apple and Google’s photo storage products (excellent products in their own right, and worth checking out as an alternative), the Ever service is no longer sustainable.  

Shutdown announcement

Since the storage of these photos was private, we don’t have anything to share here, users were given until 30 September to export their data. Now all that remains of Ever survives in WayBackMachine snapshots.

Speaking of photos, the 14 year-old Estonian photo/video hosting service Nagi and its other websites closed on October 1. Similar to Ever, they cited that the world of photography had moved to other services, as well as social media. At this point they were only an historical archive of photos, and no longer able to pay the bills. Archive Team archived their extensive Foto Album service.

Archiving Stats(207.7 Gb), Collection on the Internet Archive

Although it’s not its own website, YouTube’s community subtitling and captioning feature also went away in late September. New submissions are currently blocked off, and only previous ones may be accepted or downloaded for a limited time. Data Horde is currently working to retrieve unpublished submissions and you can read more about our project down below.

Even as September ends, there are still ongoing projects such as archiving classic Google Sites and Flash media.

At the end of the day we have to wonder, are all these websites fading away because they have been obsoleted? Or are they silently dying just because they don’t match the current trends? Only time will tell. If the world just forgot about some of these ideas, those who might see underutilized potential in them will know where to look for inspiration…

While the new version of Google Sites launched in 2016, it will still be possible to create new classic Google Sites until November 1, 2020.

After November 2020, inactive classic Google Sites will have a private copy exported to Google Drive. This copy will not necessarily be easy to republish at its original URL in the future. After September 2021, active classic Google Sites will have a private copy exported to Google Drive and a private draft copy of it created in the new Google Sites, meaning they can be easily be republished in the future.

This news is important because it means that many websites published with classic Google Sites will be inaccessible to the public if the site owner is not around, not able to, or doesn’t care to take action to migrate it to the new Google Sites or export the content and transfer it elsewhere.

Although classic Google Sites launched in 2008, some of the content that will be lost actually dates back as far as 2006 and was originally created on the predecessor to Google Sites known as Google Page Creator. When that platform shutdown in ~2008-2009, many of the sites were converted to classic Google Sites. The URLs hosted on *.googlepages.com actually still redirect to their associated Google Sites, but, given their age, a larger portion of these sites are probably inactive and will disappear on November 1, 2020.

Please spread the word and start making lists of classic Google Sites to archive in advance of these upcoming dates.

Further information is available on the Google Sites Help Center.

Content on Mixer was already temporary, but now it’s going offline for good. The good news is that they have a well-documented public API for anyone interested in archiving any streams: https://dev.mixer.com/guides/core/introduction.

Mixer had a number of exclusive streamers, all of who were invited to Facebook Gaming[2]. These exclusive streamers include the likes of Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, who’d been on the platform for nearly a year. Whether or not they choose to follow this exclusivity deal with Facebook Gaming, they are all now at risk of losing their stream recordings!

Archive Team is leading a project called #mixdown, in hopes of saving whatever they can. You can expect to hear more on that or any other “stream rescue” projects in the coming days so stay tuned!

Sources:
[1] https://blog.mixer.com/2020/06/22/the-next-step-for-mixer/
[2]https://www.facebook.com/fbgaminghome/blog/welcome-mixer-facebook-gaming

Shutdowns

For starters Google is preparing to shelve Google Play Music. In an effort to shift attention to YouTube Music, they’re endorsing people to transfer over their libraries, even offering a tutorial:

This came on the same day as Google’s shutdown of Neighbourly and Shoelace last week, a pair of experimental “local social media” apps, as reported by Killed by Google.

Next up Cardcast, a popular card-matching party game in the vein of Cards Against Humanity or Xyzzy mysteriously went offline on May 16. The game was best known for its ease in constructing custom decks, which would currently appear to be lost with its shutdown.

Cardcast would only make a brief announcement, to indicate this wasn’t an accident, and that they had to go with such an arrangement. Although stating that further details would be provided, there hasn’t been any further explanation thus far.

Next up, the Myst Online and Cyan forums were announced to be going offline June 16. The community is transitioning to a Discord Server, with this announcement serving as a warning for people who might want to archive their messages, you can read more about it at: https://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=29240

Updates

In a surprising turn of events, 8tracks returns! And what a heartwarming story it is!

TL;DR:  The 8tracks platform & brand are now owned & operated by BackBeat Inc., a new startup which acquired a portion of 8tracks’ assets during its wind-down earlier this year. 

While certain music will not be available due to licensing restrictions, most existing playlists will be available to stream, beginning today. 
If you still have the iOS app on your device, it will work out of the box.

Otherwise, we’ll be re-introducing the 8tracks mobile apps and playlist creation (and perhaps a few new surprises) in the months ahead.

Welcome Back announcement taken from https://blog.8tracks.com/2020/04/19/welcome-back-8tracks/

Besides a few changes in the business model, and currently being available only in the US, they seem to be working things out. We wish them the best of luck, seeing how brutally competitive the music streaming industry is today.

Discoveries

David Ashley, who you might remember as the sole programmer behind the Genesis port for Breach from last week, recently also released source code on a number of Gameboy Color projects: https://github.com/dashxdr/cgb