What a shame. Six months ago when Adrian Holovaty left, he told The Verge that he saw EveryBlock living for a "long, long time" and that MSNBC.com were "taking the long view on it":
And there was little reason to doubt him...I didn't use EB very much but it was an incredibly well executed site, in terms of its mapping and data-aggregation...it obviously lacked a strong editorial focus, but that was ostensibly something that MSNBC would've brought to it.
Another thing to note: it's relatively routine to bash online startups who give less than two months warning that they're closing shop and taking all their data with them (either through a buyout or failure)...EveryBlock's owners, apparently, didn't think a day's notice was needed. Was there really no middle ground between immediate shutdown and keeping the site in low-maintenance mode? It's not like those maps and geodata go out of date quickly.
I understand that a new ad service isn't just free money, per se (you need a sales staff, or at least a tech person to manage the system)...but shouldn't they wait more than 30 days to see if that is a promising, maintainable form of revenue?
Has Adrian written on why he left possibly as soon as he was able (assuming that Everyblock was acquired in "summer 2009", and many founders are tied to two year agreements to stay, and he left in August two years later)?
FWIW, he left in August 2012, which would be three years after a summer 2009 acquisition. Also, he founded it back in July 2007...so when he says he "developed an uncontrollable itch to do something new", he probably meant it.
Before Everyblock, he's been a pioneer in utilizing data and non-traditional journalism with news sites, most notably at the LJWorld.com...so he's been in this local online news business for quite a while. I don't think this is your usual case of a founder jumping ship just out of profit motive.
Yes, I don't mess around or BS on my blog. Take it at face value, cause that's how I meant it.
I'd been working on EveryBlock full-time for five years, and I'd maintained chicagocrime.org (the precursor) for two years before that, so I was ready to do something not related to local data or news. My new thing (Soundslice) is completely different.
It has nothing to do with local news or journalism -- it's a music thing. The main thing it has in common with EveryBlock is that it's fundamentally about creating structure from chaos, which is what I like to do.
> And it'd be interesting to hear what you and the other founders have been working on as well.
I'm not Adrian, but I'll answer for a small part: Adrian released a guitar album, and made http://www.soundslice.com/ (a guitar tab site, that plays tabs to Youtube videos)
For anyone interested, the Knight Foundation helped fund EveryBlock with a grant that required them to open source their code. http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/
The grant required that they open source it at the end of the grant period so I wouldn't be surprised if the source code was not current but for anyone who would like to keep it alive, this would give you a major head start.
The source was dumped with no version history once in 2009. So, yes, out of date.
That said, I know nothing of the conditions around this, what their plans were, and so on - so not judging. And a site like EveryBlock is less about source code and more about execution and moderation, which they did quite well for a time.
They own the copyright to the code: they can do what they want with it. The licence is only a restriction on what people who don't own it can do.
Also, the GPLv3 is not the same thing as the AGPL. Even if they didn't own the code, if it was only GPL then they could make changes without making those available since they were not distributing the software (assuming this was just a webapp). The AGPL closes that loophole.
Copyright licenses apply to third parties, not owners.
The GPLv3 compels entities other than the copyright holder to make available source code to those who receive non-source code versions of software, if they are actually distributing the software or "offer access" to the work (e.g.: as a Web app). The copyright holder him or herself, whether by authorship or assignment, has no such obligations. Third parties would, as would the project maintainer if that maintainer accepted third-party contributions without assignment.
If the Knight Foundation grant required continual availability in open source form, that would be a different contractual obligation under the grant.
Just because this code is released under GPLv3 it doesn't mean that the main codebase is GPLv3. They have complete ownership of their own code & can do as they will with it. The GPL only controls the rights of other people that want to use it.
I was on the site nearly every day and poured hours of my life writing community posts, updating information, etc. This may not mean much to people outside of Chicago, but stuff like the epic debate between Eddie Carazana and Jim DeRogatis on the future of the Congress Theater, gone forever?
Users can become surprisingly dependent on your site, give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask and gives users time to prepare, move data, swap contact details, backup and such.
I'm dealing with this issue right now with Snip.it. They were clearly in talks with Yahoo! about being purchased (and potentially others as they were putting out surveys every few months about usage and purpose that I filled out each and every time), but didn't inform any of us that the site would literally be shut off late one day and we would be unable to retrieve (or even look at in read-only mode) all of the data we'd put on the site.
We were initially able to grab a PDF or HTML file of the links we'd posted, but none of the additional descriptions we'd place along with them. They told us to try Kippt and Diigo but the way they'd formatted the file wasn't friendly to either of these services, which would lump them all together instead of separate them by the categories we'd placed them in (although it would "tag" them with the category, but that doesn't help me navigate when my tags aren't listed out anywhere). When I complained about the descriptions issue on their Facebook page, they added them a few days later and another service (keeeb) tried to reach out and ask them how they could better serve the fallout (not sure if they responded, but keeeb looks like a neat service). I got in touch with Kippt to ask if they could figure out a way to get the imports to work correctly since they were being advertised, and they asked for my export file and said they'd work on it, but I haven't heard anything back.
I don't care if your service is free or not (and I even informed Snip.it I would have paid for the service, as some people replied on the linked post did as well), you owe it to the users that gave a shit about you and wanted to see you succeed to have some sort of grace period, and better, to escort them to similar services so they aren't left completely in the dust, having spent months and years of time contributing to and advertising for your company. At least in my situation, they tried to do the latter, even though these services weren't actually anything like their own and couldn't parse the data.
Whatever Yahoo! plans on doing with the Snip.it team, I won't be using it. I hope they're happy they've alienated a vibrant and growing audience.
Understood, but the problem seems to be growing lately in the sense of "shoestring funded" startups going for broke. When it finally becomes apparent that the business can't continue there are not always a lot of resources left for a graceful shutdown.
My opinion is that the "you owe it to your users..." idea is dangerous. That line of thinking could eventually lead to a class action lawsuit over something like "lost images" from the next failed social pic app. Which increases the costs and risks associated with trying new ideas, which discourages that innovation.
I think that users need to better understand the web-things that they grow "attached" to, and not just continually expect all web sites to be free magic unicorn tears from the sky. This "fremium" model is honestly not scaling very feel, yet people are becoming more expectant that simple sites are free. The ad-supported avenue isn't working out all that great for advertisers, site owners, or users either.
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback if the very next day you are left with nothing, just as there is no incentive to try a service if it is forcing me to pay before so much as a demo or trial period.
The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.
As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.
This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback
Note that in my original comment I said "... please don't become highly dependent...". By all means you SHOULD try new services, and offer your feedback and suggestions where possible if you think that the site has potential. But understand that it might not be a good idea to get overly invested in a site that does not have a clear ability to maintain its persistence.
If my intent is not to get invested, I'm not going to use it. I look at it, I toy around with it, and I decide whether or not it is applicable to my needs. If it is, I'm going to use it, and the more I use it, the more dependent I become on it. I don't see how not using a service helps anyone on either side of the fence. If I don't 'depend on it' - therefore not use it - it definitely won't continue to exist, free or not.
From the outset, nothing about the site looked like it was going under; they'd recently redesigned, they were adding/changing features, my collections were clearly getting picked up somehow without my assistance, they were still sending their newsletters and highlighting users. There was no way of knowing until the email hit our inboxes that afternoon, just hours after I'd last submitted a link.
Yes, but in this example it's not a shoestring funded startup. It's MSNBC. The parent company decided to shut it down abruptly and there was probably zero time to migrate anything. This stuff happens all the time at big companies when downsizing occurs.
At one of my previous positions, I was laid off and provided zero notice beforehand. They cut off my access in the middle of a production deploy and it failed in the middle.
Yeah, I'll just stop using your products and let your shareholders know it was because people on HackerNews knew better than to build solutions people will use.
I'm simply trying to point out that there are decisions you can control and decisions you can't. You can control what your life takes a dependency on, and how tightly coupled you are to particular products and services.
For different types of products and services, you have more or less control and confidence about the future of those products and services. For software that you own and run on your box, that control and confidence is higher. For services on which you are completely dependent on software running on someone else's box for which you have no contract or service level agreement, that confidence and control is lower.
You have control over whether you want to complain and whine when a service you've tightly coupled yourself to makes a change you find objectionable. You don't have control over that change. Understanding which decisions you do and don't have control over is useful.
There's a deep irony in telling people on a site like this not to use the tools that we all put our blood, sweat and tears into every day.
If onboarding wasn't such a big deal and something people needed in order to prove the market exists and there's money to be made, we wouldn't see a good portion of the posts here about it and we wouldn't see so many ShowHNs with people asking for advice on how to make it more clear for their target demographic.
At the end of the day this hurts everyone; dropping users with no where to go and with a fraction of the effort they put into your tool to begin with causes them to question how much they can trust new companies and services. It makes it harder for others to make the case that they are worth using at all, no less long-term.
To turn around and blame users for their so-called ignorance on the matter is ignorant itself. We beg them to sign on with us and then expect them to know that's what they were in for when we kick them to the curb? This problem isn't exclusive to freemium models, either, which is even worse.
Perhaps I'm approaching this from a different perspective which is why I think my comments came across more abrasive than I meant them.
I'm certainly not trying to blame users for ignorance. I personally, however, have a strong aversion to coupling myself to tools and services whose future I have low confidence in. What I was trying to impart to mnicole as a consumer was this aversion. The lesson I'd send to the rest of the development community is that if you structure your tool or service in a way that it is not possible for me to either have a low dependency on you or a high confidence in your future, you fail the sniff test.
Why should a user know about a sites business model? To an average joe you letting me sign up and do stuff is all I know. While "giving a week" isn't a rule, it sure sounds like it might be the nicer thing to do.
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response, but in all reality its not the users responsibility to provide longevity.
And lets face it, we (startups) would be totally f'd if users didn't become entirely dependent on our services early doors, perhaps even pre-biz model.
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response
You make a good point, and I did not mean that as the "obvious" response, I meant it as a simple counter-response. As I kind of mentioned in my other comment, I think there can be many cases where the startup that is shutting down is going to be unable to afford a graceful wind-down, for various reasons.
Startups and Users are basically at-will employers and employees in a sense. Either can leave the other unexpectedly at any time, and I think it would be wise to approach things with the understanding that neither should expect the other to "just be there".
>And lets face it, we (startups) would be totally f'd if users didn't become entirely dependent on our services early doors, perhaps even pre-biz model.
I (and many other people) try to educate users not to do this. It's an uphill battle, most people are not interested until the day they lose a bunch of their data when some startup webapp they uses has burned through all their cash and closes down. This is becoming increasingly common though, so I think people are starting to realise that they can't trust cloud services/web apps. I'd like to think raising awareness will help end the trend towards centralised computing that denies users control of their data, but most people still don't even back up their local files, so…
These kinds of shutdowns are useful examples for the next time I'm having this discussion with somebody. Although I'd rather a bunch of people didn't have to lose data I feel nothing will change until this happens a quite a few more times with bigger sites.
Which is to say, I'm afraid I hope you are "totally f'd" because web startups are a malign force when it comes to data security. It's nothing personal…
But I think what Geoff said about what startups want is very interesting, and true. We persuade users to depend on us because we need it for success. To then turn around as a community and say "ha, why did you do that, idiot?" seems disingenuous to me.
'Turning around' implies it's the same group of users doing both. I, for one, have never persuaded a user to depend on a startup; I am squarely on the side of advising users never to depend on anything without a well-understood business plan, EVER.
Did they not have ads? Because "free with ads" supports most of the internet, and I don't think anyone can tell which things they should rely on and which they can't.
I mean, once they were bought by NBC, they din't seem any less dependable than MSNBC or such.
The general idea is that startups which shut down like this impose a cost on _every other startup_ out there, because it makes people more hesitant to actually use and rely on services provided by startups due to their memory of being burned. Yes, this includes the next startup that the people working on that particular startup are going to work on too.
EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC in 2009, and NBCUniversal took full control of MSNBC in 2012. NBC which has now decided to shut EB down effective immediately and little to no warning even to everyblock itself (they launched a new service exactly a month ago: http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/).
a) It can be too much to ask. They owe you nothing.
b) EveryBlock was bought by NBC. They're hardly a startup anymore.
c) If the service is free, watch your stuff. This sort of thing WILL happen.
I totally agree. I think loose "startups" for "service", though.
Us as service creators and owners do to a certain degree have a level of responsibility to the users, I get the value exchange of users time/use <> us maintaining the service is enough to make some people think that the responsibility check is "balanced" but we're talking 7 days. These users invested THEIR time, confidence and love into your service, they might have (whether directly or indirectly) paid your salary.
"give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask"
Do you think that the "one week period" is going to get continued funding? I doubt most are given that much time ahead to prepare, let alone able to prepare to give the users the ability to prepare.
this assumes the startup in question has some sort of control over the situation. I bet that isn't always the case. I'm sure ideally everyblock would have liked to wind things down a little less abruptly, but sometimes, reality sucks.
For all those complaining that Everyblock should have given more notice, this obviously came as a surprise to the team.
Just look at their blog history.
Exactly 1 month ago (Jan 7th), they announced [1] a new Neighborhood Ad service for Business.
People don't announce new paying services and then completely shut the doors 4 weeks later unless someone way up the NBC management chain axed this unexpectedly.
User comment from the linked blog post found this article that gives more insight. NBC recently took full control of msnbc.com which was the parent of everyblock. I was aware of this but hadn't made the connection in this context.
This seems like a great opportunity for someone to acquire basic contact information from those former EB power users posting on this blog entry, each of whom will likely be able to rally hundreds of former EB users to help you populate an EveryBlock clone you swiftly roll out. Your site could easily take off now that the niche is completely empty again.
Creating yet another centralised web app on a shoestring budget is hardly the solution here. No doubt it too would lose money and get shut down or get bought out and get shut down. Unless somebody with resources is prepared to fund/maintain it, but even then you are reliant on the goodwill, energy and money of a single person. Even charging users doesn't solve the problem of the owner just pulling the plug for whatever reason.
The centralised web model is broken when it comes to any kind of services that stores significant user data (and it turns out that most things involve storing user data). If you are going to order people to start coding, at least tell them to start coding on solutions to the real problem.
I'm really stunned by this news - I've always been inspired by what Paul and Adrian created - but I think a news organization was a misaligned parent-company for this kind of site. My "side project" has been working on something in a similar space, so I hope somebody publishes a post-mortem.
The fact that this code is not current is extremely surprising, actually. It's GPLV3-licensed, so my somewhat uninformed expectation is that MSNBC would be obligated to open-source any derivative works? Unless they did a complete rewrite of the codebase at some point.
I created a petition asking MSNBC to open-source the latest codebase and also release the user-generated content to the public domain:
From GPLV3: "One of the fundamental requirements of the GPL is that when you distribute object code to users, you must also provide them with a way to get the source."
Presumably MSNBC didn't distribute object code to users, in which case they have no obligation to open-source any derivative work.
MSNBC really screwed the pooch on this one, from their initial "open source" via zipfile, to the zero-day shutdown. Not what the Knight Foundation intended to fund with their open source requirements.
Per another thread of discussion, apparently the rules of the GPL do not apply to the licensor, only the licensee. If MSNBC accepted OSS community contributions to the Everyblock codebase, they might be in violation. But if it was a one-way offering, they can apparently still retain full rights. I imagine the initial Mozilla-Knight foundation grant makes this a bit more complex, but IANAL.
Anyone can take a piece of GPL'd software and modify it as much as they'd like for their own use. There is absolutely no requirement to publish or "contribute back" those changes. (Think, for example, about Amazon customizing or modifying Xen for EC2. They do not have to publish their modified code or share it with "the community".)
If, however, you share binary/compiled/etc. forms of your modifications, you are then required to make the source code available.
As a follow-up to myself, if you are the copyright holder you can do whatever you'd like with the code including, for example, dual licensing.
Many, many years ago (I'm not sure if this is still true (I doubt it)), MySQL was dual-licensed. It was free for personal use, for example, but if you wanted to 1) use it commercially or 2) run it on Windows, you had to pay.
Perl, AFAIK, is still dual-licensed under the GPL and the Artistic License.
I think the last time I checked it was six months ago, when Adrian left and I was curious to how the site actually looked. To my surprise, the site seemed to have thrived in appearance...the navigation had been cleaned up, more data sources had been added, and users were participating in discussions.
I signed up as a user but didn't stay around...I think the site failed to become a "sticky" place. There was not enough of the psychological reward in returning to the site/refreshing the hoomepage...the site seemed content with just delivering a raw stream of datapoints rather than filtering out key stories and weighting their importance (which is another argument for how successful Facebook has been with their Top Stories feed, even though people think they just want items in chronological order).
EveryBlock seemed very lackluster in its promotion. If I wasn't in the online news business and had been aware of the Knight News challenge, Adrian's early journalism work, or of Django, I don't think I would've ever heard of EveryBlock.
Their Twitter account had fewer than 4,000 followers, which seems incomprehensibly low for an online community news site 5-years-old. Reddit has a thriving community of city-based subreddits...there's no reason why EveryBlock's rich information shouldn't have been a staple on them, but it was hardly ever linked to:
I wish I could offer some link examples of the things I thought EveryBlock did well, but apparently its owners see no value in its long tail archival traffic and have effectively blanked out the site.
EB may have suffered from a lack of discoverability of its best features.
The feature I found most useful was the ability to define an area on a map, then get email updates when other users posted news in that area. I think that should have been the primary focus of Everyblock instead of the raw stream of data.
I used it frequently--it was my main source of news about my neighborhood. Everyblock created a great forum for neighbors to come together and discuss issues pertinent to their part of the city.
I wanted to try using it, but they only supported the city "proper" that I live near (a couple hundred feet from the border, actually), and not my metro area. While I could see that being a hard thing, dev-wise, to do, I'd say it was a huge shortcoming.
This is really too bad, this was a great site and there doesn't really seem to be anything else like it out there. I'm surprised they couldn't come up with a way to make this profitable - and the closure is pretty sudden, wonder what the back story is there.
My neighorhood in Chicago used this pretty extensively and it really helped keep people connected and aware of what was going on. Sad to see that go.
This site has seen a little traction in my neighborhood (which surprised me because there's also a mailing list that about 20% of the neighborhood is subscribed to): https://nextdoor.com – it seems well executed. None of the aggregation stuff Everyblock did, though.
Where I live (northern NJ) everyone knows about and uses Patch. Even non-techy people. I'm really impressed by how quickly they've become the go-to source for local news.
Yeah, Patch hit on a pretty big gap in the news market. The bigger newspapers cut and cut on local reporters, to the point where a daily newspaper might have a half-dozen local stories covering their very large coverage area. Patch can start a micro-site, have someone write an article or two about that town each day, and be much more interesting to people.
The whole free/not-free/kinda-free issue is raised in a couple of ways in this thread. NBC mentioned the challenge of creating a business model (caveat recent advertising efforts)
The question I have been following (and Dan Gillmor as well) is this, "Is there a 'self supporting' model for local journalism?"
For that to work the revenues generated have to cover the cost of running the site. And my experience is that this has to mean both keeping the cost of running the site as low as possible as well as finding revenue. We can see by example that without such a model these sites disappear.
Three possible models come to mind, although I'm sure there must be more;
1) Visitors to the site pay for access. Historically this is challenging, but with the experience of 'free' sites vanishing due to money problems perhaps there is a core set of consumers who could create a viable market for this.
2) Advertisers on the site share the costs of operating it amongst themselves. This is the current model for free 'weeklys' where advertising funds are the largest revenue model. The 'value' of net advertising however is much lower than paper advertising thanks in part to Google and others. So this is made harder by that and people more easily avoiding the advertisements.
3) A civic fund, basically spending some of the community's tax dollars on funding a local news portal/site.
Given the way that everyblock got created perhaps a migration where its tax funded at first, then advertising funded later? Sort of a private/public partnership. Clearly every city has communication issues with their citizens so they could use this sort of channel to reach out to folks who don't keep flyers around (Sunnyvale for example has a flyer which says which days of the year are free for bringing in hazardous waste to the dump)
I certainly agree with the general sentiment that this is a useful service.
This is amazingly(!) ham-fisted on the part of NBC. everyblock.com was pretty vibrant from what I could tell. And being forced to shutter overnight is about as unprofessional as it gets (again, I understand this as, without a doubt, some NBC exec throwing a temper tantrum and not realizing the value of their own assets when hitting the nuke button).
I saw a lot of connecting going on there, in a way that is much more valuable than other social websites in that people could use it as a way to promote and share local/in the flesh resources and information and it brought a lot of value to the people who used it. That there was no warning, no way for people to reach out to others they'd like to stay in touch with after the shutdown is reckless decision making. Just a full-on, ridiculous implosion. Social capital is a real thing, and it's too bad that NBC does not consider that in their ledger.
Our neighborhood uses Nextdoor (about 950 homes) and it's fantastic for community building. It focused more on personal interaction than hyperlocal news aggregation, but in my opinion that made it more useful.
Neighbors in our community who have lived on the same block for 20 years without speaking are now getting together for block parties and sharing info about babysitters and local crimes. It's actually very useful.
Everyblock was a great way to find out about what was going on in my neighborhood. I wish they had given a little more warning; I would have gone back and read some things before they closed their doors. Then again, hard to complain about such an excellent free service.
They lost their founder only a few months ago. I have no inside information, but I can't imagine that this is unrelated.
I wish the whole team the best of luck! They did a great job with Everyblock. I hope they do something else amazing soon.
Founder's been gone since August of 2012. I wish they'd given more of an explanation behind closing. As of this blogpost: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/goodbye-everyblock/ it seems they were optimistic. Sad to see his writing about acquisitions within today's context.
This is disappointing news. When I found out everyblock, it was exciting. I really liked the idea and in fact, had a few ideas in my own head for something similar.
I really really think we need a good way to connect better with neighbors and our neighborhoods. Would love to know more details why Everyblock failed.
Reddit has some great city/state subreddits (obviously depends on how tech-friendly your city is.) http://www.reddit.com/r/austin is a pretty thriving place, for example.
Neighborhoods, in some cases, will have private groups. For instance, when I bought a house in my current neighborhood in Austin, the neighbors let me know about a private Yahoo group for this neighborhood. My neighborhood's population is just over 6,000 people. The Yahoo group has 1397 members and averages over 30 messages per day (!) Anything from "Can you recommend a plumber?" to "I have extra firewood" will show up there. The neighborhood association also prints a hard-copy newsletter that they deliver every month, which is sponsored by local businesses. (Note: We are not an HOA neighborhood--we just happen to have a pretty active population.)
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/16/3245325/5-minutes-on-the-v...
And there was little reason to doubt him...I didn't use EB very much but it was an incredibly well executed site, in terms of its mapping and data-aggregation...it obviously lacked a strong editorial focus, but that was ostensibly something that MSNBC would've brought to it.
Another thing to note: it's relatively routine to bash online startups who give less than two months warning that they're closing shop and taking all their data with them (either through a buyout or failure)...EveryBlock's owners, apparently, didn't think a day's notice was needed. Was there really no middle ground between immediate shutdown and keeping the site in low-maintenance mode? It's not like those maps and geodata go out of date quickly.
----
Edit: Just one month ago, EveryBlock had developed a new form of advertising targeted at the neighborhood level: http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/
I understand that a new ad service isn't just free money, per se (you need a sales staff, or at least a tech person to manage the system)...but shouldn't they wait more than 30 days to see if that is a promising, maintainable form of revenue?