Ars Technica

Glenn Fleishman

Seattle tech pundit and blogger Glenn Fleishman doesn't want to be the next "pud," the pseudonym of the infamous leader of F***edCompany.com during the dot com bust.

But Fleishman, a regular contributor to KUOW, Ars Technica and other sites, does want to keep track of the online services that are fading away. That's why he created ITDied.com, a site which  -- like the name suggests -- chronicles the demise of Internet services. There you can read about Conde Nast's decision to shut down social networking service Flip.com or the collapse of instant messaging service Pownce. There's also this great headline: "Yahoo Live? Dead."

Fleishman is a genuinely nice guy and says he doesn't have a bone to pick with the services he writes about. He sees ITDied as a public service to inform people what might happen to photos, documents and other information that may disappear into the cloud.

"There wasn't a clearinghouse I could find that reported on what was going away and what to do about it," said Fleishman, who started ITDied after online photo service Digital Railroad fell off the tracks. 

Fleishman, who also runs the Wi-Fi Networking News site, expects to be busy in the coming months.

"I expect that over the coming months hundreds, and even thousands, of hosted services will shut down. It's been very easy in the last 2 to 4 years to set up a scalable service that could have thousands to millions of users," he said. "But actually paying oneself, turning a profit, or returning dividends to investors has proven generally more difficult than anticipated. Services are clearly running on fumes...."

And whatever happened to good old "pud" -- also known as Philip Kaplan? The F***edCompany founder -- who went on to found Silicon Valley advertising startup AdBrite -- wrote in a blog post this week that he probably wouldn't re-start the site.

"I’ve been working on other things, and I don’t think I could make (F***edcompany) as funny/mean as I used to, because I live in the Silicon Valley area now and know too many of the people involved. When I was running FC in 2000, I was living in NYC and didn’t know anyone," he wrote.

That's OK. As the Wall Street Journal points out, there are plenty of other dead pool sites that are trying to fill the void.  Here at TechFlash, we've even started our own "Pink Slip Watch" for the Seattle area.