When digital services die...

I probably should have put together an outline for this before I started writing.  Apologies if this starts to ramble.

So I used to use this app for the iPhone called Path (or path.app or path.com )It had an associated path.com website, but for the most part it was an app-only experience.  Similar to Instagram - take pictures post them online. It had some neat features, camera effects and a great app.  Much like google+ though it never hit critical mass for adoption.  One of the things it did do amazingly well and simply is post to path, instagram, facebook, tumblr, wordpress.com and twitter all at the same time with a single post.

The cross-posting of a single picture or story to multiple social media sites well is a problem that no one has solved to my knowledge.   There are a few that are targeted at 'influencers' or PR people - they're for managing PR campaigns and basically for people who are doing it for profit, not ordinary folks who want to publish across multiple platforms easily.  Path did that for me very very well at first, and then in their attempts to draw people in it got worse.  To start they would post the picture to your timelines as if you posted it directly on that app (except for twitter, they didn't do that in 2012).  Later they would post a thumbnail and then when you'd click it it'd take you to Path.com to view the full size.  It was mostly an attempt to drive traffic to their platform.

Path.com and the associated app shuttered their sights and services in 2018.  Now my twitter timeline has a bunch of stuff like this:

I remember when Outfield opened for St... ♫ Your Love by The Outfield (at Fairlington Villages 3000 Block S Abingdon) — http://t.co/7K2cIvPG

— rwhiffen (@rwhiffen) April 18, 2012

or links to pictures like this:

Martini with a chemay chaser (at Elephant And Castle Pub & Restaurant) [pic] — http://t.co/escT3Hbe

— rwhiffen (@rwhiffen) June 26, 2012

But the there's nothing at the other end of that link anymore.   It still shows up on Tumblr, sort of:



But due to a bug, the text that goes with it is missing (they fix it in a few months if I recall correctly). https://rwhiffen.tumblr.com/post/25898920668

Anyway all those links and the text and stories that went with them are dead now.  Thankfully the folks at Path were very generous and prepared xml downloads of every users path data.   If I ever get nostalgic or desperate I can dig through it and find the info I want. 

So that made me think about other services, like myspace (it's still there!) or Yahoo360 and Google+ what are we loosing when those sites disappear?