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Formspring is shutting down
- unreal37 14y agoIs this really the official FormSpring blog, with only two entries?
- teej 14y agoYes, it's linked at the top of http://www.formspring.me/formspring http://www.formspring.me/formspring with the message "Important Formspring News"
- iampims 14y agoWe `reset` the blog a few months ago. That’s why there are only a couple of posts.
- unreal37 14y agoSorry to hear the news. I hope you and the team go on to new and greater things.
- iampims 14y agoWhile it’s heartbreaking to have to shut down something you’ve poured your heart into for many years, we have learned many things along the way that will help us for what’s coming next. Thanks for the kind words.
- mtrimpe 14y agoCan I ask how much (low/mid/high x-digits) the raw AWS hosting costs of a site like this are? I'd love the idea of trying to take over something like this, but I have a suspicion I might be in way over my head...
- iampims 14y agoI can’t disclose the costs but I can share a few things: - Our cassandra and Redis clusters are/were the most expensive pieces of the architecture. - the PHP front-end wasn’t really efficient and required many `medium sized` instances. - Sites with huge fanout effects are expensive to run. - Multi-platform : iOS, Android, "touch" and www. Maintenance gets expensive. - Multi-AZ on RDS comes at a price - If you intend to run on AWS, Reserved Instances are your best friends.
- yogo 14y agoI still don't understand why anyone would want to use AWS unless you had money to burn. I haven't followed the prices as of a couple years ago but I'd say most people on here are smart enough to find cheaper solutions that can achieve the same thing. If saving money is your goal you can make it happen--there are providers out there with the right APIs that allow you to build something that can scale (or adapts) at a fixed/linear cost. If you have the money and it isn't worth your time to setup the infrastructure then AWS would be the right decision. I just don't understand the infatuation.
- iampims 14y agoThe real benefits of AWS is scale on demand, if you need it. Formspring reached 1 million users in 45 days. How do you plan for this on typical hardware? Especially when you had no idea ANYONE would use your little side project? AWS isn't cheap. It offers building blocks upon which you can "easily" build and scale a website. Not for everyone, but good enough for us.
- pinwale 14y agoAny reason why the export period is so short? The archive team is trying to make a backup of the site at the moment. Any help would be appreciated on EFnet IRC channel #firespring or #archiveteam Archive team projects: http://archivingyoursh.it/Current_Projects http://archivingyoursh.it/Current_Projects
- iampims 14y ago@pinwale Starting March 31st, no new content will be created on Formspring. The site will be in read mode only. Ping me tim {at} formspring.me if you want more info.
- Mahn 14y agoVery surprising the company didn't end up acquired by a major player, I remember it was all the rage in 2010. Good luck in your future endeavours Ade and team.
- bherms 14y agoFinally... Living in Indy and knowing several people behind this, I knew it was doomed from day one. Social plays like this try to do nothing more than capitalize on trends without adding any real value. They pivoted from a form generating site to a virality play, which was never even executed well to begin with. ...and now they shoot for a photo app. <sarcasm> Good work </sarcasm>
- eth 14y agoSeriously? 30 million users at FormSpring's peak seems to be executed relatively well. It was no Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but 30 million users is a damn good failure as far as I'm concerned. Now if you want to talk about social plays that capitalize on trends with without adding any real value that are not executed especially well, then we can talk about Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning"s travesty that is Airtime.
- bherms 14y ago30 million users generating no revenue. edit: and retention rates were abysmal. 30 million people signed up is a vanity metric. actual "users" was a very, very small fraction of that
- chaz 14y agoI have a hard time criticizing someone for taking a ride on something that was grew from 0 to 30 million uniques in 6 months, just to see where it goes. You're right it wasn't super sticky and failed to drive long term utility for users, but I think most of us here would want to take a swing at that kind of growth and turn it into something that had long term value.
- eth 14y agoThank you for summarizing what I was really trying to say here, chaz. Even half of YC's consumer focused tech companies should be so lucky. The team, the direction they took the product, and the VCs/funding aside, Ade's clearly massive effort is inspiring and should be congratulated rather than completely drown out with sarcasm.
- webwright 14y agoWould love to see a retrospective. Why didn't it succeed? What did you try? Did you say no to early acquisition offers?
- msoad 14y agoThis was my first time visiting their website. I'll not sign up for a service when they don't show me what they have. I like StackOverflow because they show their content, they allow you to use their service without signing up. You will signup when you got familiar with the service enough. My rule of thumb is, show user the content, the value and then expect them to sign up. A video or some nice buzz words are not enough.
- rattray 14y agoI understand your frustration but I'm not sure it's relevant here. Formspring's issue certainly wasn't lack of signups; they claimed over 30 million.
- eurleif 14y agoFormspring does let you see someone's questions and answers without having an account if you go to the profile. I guess they could highlight some accounts on the homepage, but people mostly used it to ask their friends questions, so that wouldn't really reflect the normal use of the service.
- iampims 14y agoYeah, you can check out everybody’s profile without signing up: http://www.formspring.me/pims http://www.formspring.me/pims and you can see every public thread. And until very recently, you could even ask questions without being a registered user to the users who had this feature enabled. The only “private” features you don’t see when not registered are your stream (similar to your Twitter timeline) and your inbox (similar to your FB messages).
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- Matsta 14y agoThey couldn't be that profitable since the average of people using it was 12-13 lol. And I'm guessing the other reason they shut down is that ask.fm took over, pretty much took the exact same idea and now all the tween's are using that now...
- eurleif 14y agoThey lost a lot of traffic, and it started before ask.fk took over: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=4y&u=ask.fm&&u=formspring.me http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...
- AznHisoka 14y agoThis is what happens when you don't win the "acquisition lottery" in the game of startups. This could've easily been the fate of Instagram, or Foodspotting. On a side note.. the most politically correct way to shutdown a service is to let users export their data.. but I wonder if even 1 person is going to want to do that here.
- auctiontheory 14y agoWould be interesting to get a comparative retrospective on why these guys lost while Quora seems to have come from nowhere solidly into the mainstream.
- jkaljundi 14y agoMainstream? Isn't Quora still mostly US tech crowd. It's very little known and used in Europe outside startup/investor community.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoPoorly named co got smashed by a Quora. Name or app to blame?
- iampims 14y agoCall me when Quora has 30 million users ;-) But more seriously, the name Formspring originates from what Formspring used to be, and has been renamed Formstack: http://www.formstack.com http://www.formstack.com.
- propercoil 14y agoIf you'd like to sell the domain to a broke student I'll pay $100 for it. Either way, hopefully the future will shine upon you!
- iampims 14y agoYou are apparently not the only one :-)
- hendzen 14y agoThat's unfortunate. Some (non-teenage) people actually use it. Case in point, I'm aware of a rabbi in NY who uses it to answer questions from his congregants [1]. [1] - http://www.formspring.me/rabbiblake http://www.formspring.me/rabbiblake
- alaskamiller 14y agoI remember when Formspring.me took off on Tumblr a few years back. Then Tumblr took notice this little doodad everyone was passing around begging for questions and cloned it. Then ask.fm just tore through with the traffic. Oh well, great run. At least Formstack still works great.
- tzaman 14y agoI think the question here is, how could one make stats like those profitable - with 20M unique monthly visitors, it solves some particular problem (not sure if it's a pain, though).
- vintagius 14y agoHonestly i think what killed this site is the fact that it left a bitter taste in most users mouth.The annonymous aspect of the site-the thing that made them was ultimately the thing that killed them.It was fun until the questions about how ugly people were and secrets and rumours were being spread. This lead to potenial investors and acquirers avoiding it like a plague.
- vintagius 14y agoHonestly i think what killed this site is the fact that it left a bitter taste in most users mouth.The annonymous aspect of the site-the thing that made them was ultimately the thing that killed them.It was fun until the questions about how ugly people were and secrets and rumours were being spread. This lead to potenial investors and acquirers avoiding it like a plague. Notwithstanding the above i just want to wish the team well atleast you did something and learned alot.
- powatom 14y agoMy girlfriend used Formspring a lot for the photography related posts - would love to know if there was a simple way to scrape posts for future reference. She was upset when I told her FS was shutting down. Good luck for the future, FS team!