by HectorRamos on 3/14/12, 5:08 PM with 136 comments
by unreal37 on 3/14/12, 5:53 PM
I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".
It's like ADD at the business level.
Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.
by eoghan on 3/14/12, 7:11 PM
Business is an art. And great artists know that moving forward often requires you to say "this didn't work, let's start again."
"If you want to live your life ... as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away." — Steve Jobs
by mmastrac on 3/14/12, 5:32 PM
Our internal analysis of share/engagement metrics was showing that our own users were way more engaged than Oink's. We were expecting that if they noticed us in the market they'd have been working on rev 2 of the product - gathering intel from products like ours and integrating it - rather than shutting it down.
by pagehub on 3/14/12, 5:25 PM
by jgrahamc on 3/14/12, 5:12 PM
But I really do appreciate that they offer a way to download my data as I've done it and discovered a beer I'd forgotten about: http://www.meantimebrewing.com/our-beers/meantime-wheat
by marcamillion on 3/14/12, 8:53 PM
The price for being a cutting-edge digirati is that many of the services you use, will not survive. If you can't deal with that, wait until they go mainstream and have some viable way to stay alive. Don't complain about it.
Yes, Kevin has raised money on his name - but why all the hate? Let him do his thing and you do yours.
Try launching a product and building your own, rather than criticizing other efforts. Either way, bootstrapping, getting funding, pivoting, abandoning is not easy. Doing it with such public scrutiny is even harder.
Take a chill pill and take solace in the fact that you are in the digirati that can even see these things. Your mom likely doesn't even know what Oink is. If you would rather be like her, then stop hanging out here and complaining.
by phatbyte on 3/14/12, 5:48 PM
I think people are getting tired of using apps to tag stuff, take pictures, "like" this and that, etc... It feels like we are working for a company and not having fun or create anything, and Oink! just gave me reason to think this way even more firmly. There's no market for this anymore, because we don't have that much time to spent in dozens of different communities, and so,the less populated die.
So please, if you want to build something, please work on something real and that actual solves something, not another Flickr meets Facebook/twitter app.
by OoTheNigerian on 3/14/12, 5:49 PM
I'd really be interested in seeing what next they build.
by rglover on 3/14/12, 6:56 PM
by siglesias on 3/14/12, 6:01 PM
What I saw with Oink was this X axis (the number of items to be rated) growing faster than the Y axis (the number of ratings): in effect, noise growing faster than signal.
They weren't aggressive enough in filtering out duplicate entries and/or working with businesses to upload their catalogs onto Oink so users didn't have to add (and re-add) them. Not saying it was an easy task, but essentially this is the main challenge to such a product.
by garraeth on 3/14/12, 6:14 PM
Sounds like they are trying for a shotgun approach (didn't the company behind Angry Birds do the same thing? I don't know the official business term for this methodology). Where they have an internal API/system to roll out an idea FAST, then see if it gains any traction within their internal goal (whatever short period of time they set for themselves), and if not, scrap it to move onto the next thing...?
I think that works great for little one-off games. But with websites where people are expecting it to be around for years? Will that burn users too often, too fast, and sully your reputation? I don't know. I'm curious.
(imo, I don't know if I'd have put those two sentences in the shut-down notice - sounds like they were just experimenting with the site to see if they could make a quick buck, weren't really serious about it unless the $ or pageviews started flowing, and the users were just the guinea pigs...but that's just me.)
by deepkut on 3/14/12, 6:14 PM
What the Font was unsuccessful in determining it.
by faramarz on 3/14/12, 5:45 PM
by togasystems on 3/14/12, 5:12 PM
Edit: Kevin Rose said he would kill off any project that wasn't gaining traction and he did just that. This is what I was referring to.
by adrian201 on 3/15/12, 3:59 AM
When it launched I played around with it for a few weeks before eventually uninstalling. Reason being, when you can check-in to places via FourSquare, recommend food/items you like from restaurants via Yelp, why would you use a system like Oink (especially when it has a smaller social-footprint than the aforementioned services)?
Maybe this app was awesome for you Bay area folks, but in NYC I never found much when I used the “find nearby” feature. Their interface was also inundated with too many data points as well (see there item detail screen).
I think the next wave of apps, now that we're experiencing check-in fatigue, is "passive utility" apps (Highlight, Sonar, etc). Their value can be ascertained with little friction (literally all you have to do is walk by someone) and there's tremendous room expansion on its core concept (dating based on shared interests, linkedin introductions based on shared contacts, etc.).
by timmm on 3/14/12, 8:03 PM
How many Apple products have failed? How many 37Signals products failed?
by JulianMiller520 on 3/14/12, 6:06 PM
by neovive on 3/14/12, 6:34 PM
by unohoo on 3/14/12, 5:40 PM
------------------------- This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own. --------------------
if this is indeed the case, they should have been upfront about it. This is like taking users for a ride. 'Now that we have enough data, we're going to shut this thing down'
by loso on 3/14/12, 10:45 PM
by moocow01 on 3/14/12, 8:32 PM
by helen842000 on 3/15/12, 11:52 AM
I knew Milk was going to do multiple apps - I didn't think they'd delete their old ones before they started on their new ones.
It now seems apparent they're looking for 'the one' that sticks and they're not interested in building a portfolio of products with a strong fan-base. I would have thought keeping their early-adopter user base happy would have been a really valuable asset.
I feel they'll get a less favourable uptake for their next app now, so if Oink didn't get the traction they were looking for they might struggle more next time.
by benackles on 3/15/12, 2:41 AM
by SandersAK on 3/14/12, 7:08 PM
For better or worse, this is kindof a blip on the cosmic radar, even in the tech world.
I dunno how I'd react if I was an investor - I guess you invest in a guy like that because you're long on him, and in that case, the failures don't matter as long as your equity carries over.
by Shane_Wolf on 3/14/12, 11:02 PM
Plus, its not like Rose cant just move on anyways. He's got plenty of $$ and connections to fund his next venture.
by farhad667 on 3/15/12, 1:57 PM
Timing aside, this method of "putting a bullet in its head" (which is not even a good expression to use colloquially), was a terribly callous way to treat their current users too... Especially given the fact that for a few thousand dollars a month (max) they could have kept the system rolling in the cloud indefinitely, without investing any time in it. They then could have put out feelers to find it's users / content a new home... (For example, our new start-up chee.rs would gladly have welcomed oink users -- in fact we're working on a quick oink importer as I write this. :)
Or, even if they weren't interested in transitioning users to someone else, they could have kept things running at least until their next big idea came along to announce to their users: "Hey we've got this new great thing, come on over and now that we have it, we've decided to finally and reluctantly shutter Oink, because we hadn't seen it gain much traction. Sorry about letting you down... blah blah blah."
Much better for PR than "We put a bullet in your head and moved on... But, we hope you'll join us again for another round as soon as your headache subsides."
by pacomerh on 3/15/12, 3:40 AM
I guess this proves that even a great design and great execution are not enough, you also need a clever idea huh. What do you think?.
by waldr on 3/15/12, 11:53 AM
by barrynolan on 3/14/12, 8:27 PM
by iamjoshua on 3/14/12, 6:03 PM
by dreadsword on 3/15/12, 1:20 AM
Was Kevin Rose involved in Pownce? That felt like another "meh" effort from the former Diggers.
by TheShrike on 3/15/12, 11:16 AM
by zinssmeister on 3/14/12, 6:08 PM
But actually I am still surprised how quick this got axed. As a user you gotta ask yourself these days if it's worth investing a lot of time and content into a new app. An App that might be shut down, just because the builders want to go try out a new idea. To give Kevin Rose some credit here, he always state up front that Milk was going to "try" different ideas and move on to another if one wasn't bringing the right amount of traction. Now I hoped that the transition over to a new idea wouldn't mean the instand death of the previous and that's probably the biggest surprise here.
by conorwade on 3/14/12, 7:59 PM
We will see what happens with their next effort.
by dustineichler on 3/14/12, 6:25 PM
by Andrex on 3/14/12, 9:09 PM
Although they were taking quite a while to put it out.
by dirkdk on 3/15/12, 1:01 AM
by jcromartie on 3/15/12, 12:58 AM
by seanp2k2 on 3/15/12, 5:54 AM
by farhad667 on 3/15/12, 10:55 PM
by syed123 on 3/14/12, 7:17 PM
by sirwanqutbi on 3/15/12, 1:42 AM
by rdssassin on 3/15/12, 3:04 AM
by jjacobson on 3/14/12, 6:25 PM
by woodall on 3/14/12, 7:51 PM
by didip on 3/14/12, 7:59 PM
by zyfo on 3/14/12, 5:36 PM
by wavephorm on 3/14/12, 6:05 PM
by shareme on 3/14/12, 5:35 PM
How ethical is this to set something up to obviously collect 'free data'?
by cft11 on 3/14/12, 6:29 PM