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great news juicy campus out of business

From Matt Ivester of now failed startup, Juicy Campus

Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can’t survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009.

From the author of the TechCrunch article

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the site’s advertising issues stemmed from the fact that it often featured incredibly hateful and mean-spirited content that advertisers were hesitant to be associated with. Ivester has long maintained that the site was for ‘Juicy’ gossip, not mean insults, but with top threads including “Biggest Whore At Tulane”, it was hardly a place for light-hearted fun. In light of the overwhelmingly negative comments found on the site, some schools began banning JuicyCampus entirely, leading Ivester to claim that they were “joining the ranks of the Chinese government in internet censorship, and spitting in the faces of everyone who believes in free discourse online”.

I suspect that the second one is the closest to the truth. Juicy Campus was a festering sore on the internet and a poke in the eye to everyone that uses the web for business or entertainment and goes out of their way to avoid causing distress.

Reading through the comments attached to this article I get the impression that this nasty little start up will not be missed.

Free eBook Minimalist Cooking Recipes

No Google Browser sync for Firefox 3 – ever

Check update at bottom of this post – Easy fix for Google Notebook Firefox extension not working in later browsers.

This is irritating although not catastrophic

Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

This is a surprise, I’ve just got used to GBS (Google Browser Sync) doing its thing behind the scenes and have come to take for granted the fact that the browsers on all three of my computers would look the same and have the same bookmarks.

Judging by the comments there are free products that have most of the functionality but none that sync passwords- this will be the real pain. I will be loading the Firefox extension Foxmarks later on today, from what I can gather they store bookmarks on the web and most people seem to like the service. The bookmarks on the web thing does feel a bit retro though. I liked the fact that GBS worked in the background and was very unobtrusive.

This commenter (on the original article) raises an obvious point:

g33k at 12:32 PM on 06/13/08

Reply by Email

Call me Captain Obvious, but why don’t they just open-source the thing and let the OSS community take it and run with it? That way, they don’t have to do any more work and those people who value the extension will be able to still use it. Like one of the previous posters said, GBS did password syncing, which I found valuable. Excluding some bookmarks was also nice.

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The discontinuation of GBS may not be critical but it got me thinking about just how much of my computer based stuff is tied up with Google and that if they pulled the plug on some of these other services I would be, well screwed is the politest term that comes to mind:

I have two years of work on Google Notes and if that were to go the way of GBS I would be in trouble – I have literally thousands of notes in maybe 50 or so notebooks from a period (I think) of over 3 years. There is no way that I could copy and paste all of these into something else.

I am going to have to think on this a little.

UPDATE: Easy solution here