MediaMax/Linkup falls out of the cloud

Notorious San Diego, California-based startup The Linkup (aka MediaMax) has gone titsup. The company announced on its website on Wednesday that it was closing its doors and confirmed that users of the storage site will be unable to access their files after 8 August. In April the firm chimed on its blog that it could “become …

[Chris]

Oh great...

So an already shaky set-up is going to be even more unusable with all the customers trying to retrieve terabytes of data before August. Good luck to them...

Plus, what guarantees do the customers have the disused disks won't end up in some Nigerian stockpile primed for ID theft...

[Anonymous Coward]

Made my day

Superb news that this bunch of cowboys are shutting up shop, the only way to cancel an account was to email them on MediaMax, and they never replied to emails. Guess when you do that, you have great customer subscription rates!

Tried to use MediaMax service but it never worked at all, had to mess up my online billing details to stop being billed in the end.

[Joe K]

Streamload?!

Ahhh Streamload, so thats where you went.

I remember in 2000 or so, downloading and swapping gigs upon gigs of TV and anime, way before Bittorrent, over 56k lines.

Those were the days. Those crappy crappy days.

[Gav Powell]

The Irony Is

Streamload really WAS social storage in action - you could send vast numbers of files to other users and even emaila ddresses with the click of a button.

It was utterly brilliant until they turned it into Mediamax, which itself had years of problems and never fully recovered the level of functionality we had on Streamload. We'd just about got to Mediamax being stable and reliableish, when they hit us with thelinkup...

[Frank]

How to go badly wrong - a case study?

Really, someone should interview the key figures in all this, and a few of the 'backroom' folk. Many people will be asking how they could foul up so badly and there must be lessons to learn from all this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be a God in the Cloud

you are taking on everyone else's problems, and have to answer all the prayers.

Cloud computing is very interesting but don't believe the hype, it will morph into a facilitator not a be all and end all platform. A place to float to when your own systems go belly up, or you need to manage a flash mob.

There will be killer cloud applications, and search engines are already listed in that to an extent, Yahoo's move to open their search engine interface to unlimited use is a prime example.

But, you will still store stuff locally, you will still use applications locally. What is more likely is you computing platform will become more integrated into distributed computing, the clouds are just massive hubs and a way to coordinate that distributed computing.

With the Cloud we can see the ability to store and process in many different paradigms, some will make sense to do in a centralized location, others will not, really it is just improved integration. You should be able to deploy some new technology in unusual places that is very powerful, without having the powerful hardware in-situ.

The Cloud is the Borg though, and whilst that setup works for a lot of things, it would be dangerous to rely on it for everything, keeping some pieces of the jigsaw off the cloud, will probably be the way to finesse Cloud usage.

[Kanhef]

'Cloud computing' craze meets stark reality

Reality wins.

Google is less likely to go tits-up, of course, but this will make people think about the fad a bit more carefully.