Snip.it acquired by Yahoo – site to shut down | Hacker News Reader

Snip.it acquired by Yahoo – site to shut down

snip.it

38 pointsblo17 comments

I'll spare everyone the effort and post the mandatory acqui-hater comment:

"Ugh, I can't believe these people would work tirelessly for two years and then leave me on the hook for a product I never paid for. Sell-outs. Don't they realize that anything besides an IPO is failure?"

I'm always happy for people who get aqui-hired, but at the same time the constant threat of this happening is why I don't bother using new web services that don't already have a huge critical mass, it just isn't worth the hassle to get all my data into some service and then have it go away a few months later.

In any case, kudos to the Snip.it folks for handling this in probably the best possible way I've ever seen one of these services handle something like this.

I'm not going to make that complaint, but as someone that has provided a lot of feedback and posted to the site on a daily basis for the past year and a half or so, the fact that they completely shut off access to our pages with only two other suggestions to bring our links over to (the third was Chrome's Bookmarks Bar) without any warning whatsoever really put me off.

Likewise, one of the services they suggested importing into was Kippt, but they had no idea Snip.it was going to be pushing their audience that way and have no way of importing their export files correctly (it imports as one big chunk of links instead of recalling my 10+ collections). Thankfully, I'm talking to one of the founders of Kippt right now to get it working right.

The other similar services listed on this page don't allow for importing, which -- as these services continue to come and go -- is the most important to me.

What was Snip.it?

Looks like the price was $10m + bonuses

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/22/yahoo-buys-snip-it-10-milli...

Snip.it was a good service. One replacement is Scoop.it. And they have a revenue model, so they will hopefully not disappear too fast.

Scoop.it and Clipboard are good alternatives. One of these services should work on an import function

Shameless plug: If you're a snip.it user looking for an alternative, my app https://annotary.com is a similar replacement, which also includes highlight and annotation features. We're also bootstrapped and have a revenue model, so we're not on a countdown to taking an acquisition offer.

Why is it that most every time I'm informed of a compelling, well-implemented service, it is in an article stating that it's shutting down?

Does anyone know how much financing they took on?

The hall of fame is a really nice idea.

why do so many sites/projects end up like that?

Money. Lots and lots of money.

10M looks like a lot initially. Break it down after vesting and investment and its actually not much at all. Its a "nice bonus" for the founders and early employees, at best.

I'd say because they ultimately never generate enough revenue to pay rent? Failure is the final destination of pretty much everything that is ever built - it's a good thing some at least have the luck to be "acqui-hired" in the end...

(the fact that many start projects with that objective in mind doesn't help to improve these numbers either)

Buyout vs failure. Last I heard they had no revenue model, so...

I have to imagine it is a combination of both the attractiveness of a big payday and being able to move on to something new.

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