Announced via a shout 60 minutes ago, Rejaw is official shutting down on May 31, 2009.
Rejaw has stopped accepting new sign-ups effective immediately. From now until May 15th, you can continue to send new shouts, whispers, and replies, as well as request export of your private user data at http://rejaw.com/account/export
Rejaw is the third microblogging platform to shut down in the past year, following the footsteps of both Pownce and Jaiku. While Pownce and its staff were assimilated into Six Apart and Jaiku was essentially released back into the wild by Google, the Rejaw team is simply shutting down.
Being Different Wasn’t Enough
What is most disappointing about the announcement is that Rejaw was actually doing things differently than other microblogging platforms. They actually went against the 140 character rule, allowing people to post as much as they wanted. Other features included groups, auto-refreshing pages, email notification of replies plus their own official applications.
Unlike Twitter, which has depended on third-party developers to create clients for it’s service, Rejaw built its own desktop app (for both Mac and Windows) and an iPhone app.
No Traffic, Mo Problems
No official cause was cited for the shutdown, but its likely related to funding and/or traffic. While Twitter has just begun experimenting with various revenue generating streams, they’re sitting on heaps of cash from multiple funding rounds. Other platforms have not been so fortunate. Rejaw has been free to use since its inception and the team never hinted at sources of income for the platform.
According to Compete, traffic to the website actually increased over the previous month by 74.08%, moving from 10,054 unique visitors in February to 17,502 unique visitors in March. However, Rejaw launched in August 2008 with 53,345 unique visitors and was never able to post a month at even half that much traffic in each month since.
Time to Export Your Data Again
Just like you probably did with Pownce, now is the time to export your data from Rejaw. Head over to your export settings and submit your details to get an XML output.
Your XML file will include:
- shouts in your inbox including replies
- whispers in your inbox including replies
- people you are following
- people who are following you
- rooms you belong to including the list of owners and members
- your profile
The ironic part of this shutdown notice is that Rejaw was one of the first to build an import utility for Pownce, and was described as the best place to import your Pownce notes by Rahsheen Porter (@rahsheen).
Let us know how you feel about the platform shutting down in the comments.
Where will you move next?
Your earlier post on Jaiku quite clearly states that Jaiku isn't closing down, which is correct. So why say here that it's one of the three which has shut down?
Regardless of what the Google team do with Jaiku, Rejaw is the second such service to close in the past year.
Reply · PermalinkJaiku is shut down in the sense that you can no longer use Jaiku as a centralized network. However, you can still install your own JaikuEngine installation just as you can install your own Laconica instance. Sorry for the ambiguity.
Reply · PermalinkYou mean you can't use Jaiku as a microblogging service?
Reply · PermalinkI think the next big thing is geo-micro-blogs, i.e. micro blogging services just like twitter and jaiku but your blogs there will be geo tagged with your location. So I am wondering why haven't Rejaw guys give it a try and tried to enhance their service or even reshape it completely before they decide to shut it down.
One more point here, which is marketing, people everywhere online and offline are talking about twitter, and I don't think it is just because they like the service, but I believe that twitter marketing team are just doing what they are paid for. While Jaiku and Rejaw on the other hand are not focusing on marketing their service at all.
PS. For those who say that Jaiku is still up and running, and that it hasn't been turned off yet. Ok, Jaiku is like a zombie now, it appears to be up and running but it is deserted now, people are just leaving it and migrating to twitter, and most of the blogs published there are just published because their authors are using services like Hello.txt and Ping.fm, and they just write their tweets there and let them be published everywhere regardless of whether they use this service or that one.
Reply · PermalinkAnother micro blog is shuting down. I dont wanna see twitter be the only like google on search engines....
Reply · Permalink