Today, Om Malik reported the music tracking and playlist service, MusicMobs, had shut down, and the founder, deciding the best policy was to join the competition, rather than continue to do battle, has now become part of Last.FM. Now, the two services have become one, and in an instant, the dedicated artist, song, and genre pages I'd generated over the last few years were obliterated.You can see some of my prior mentions of MusicMobs here, here and here.
Now, instead of a site full of charts, album covers and trends showing which artists and songs were the most popular, we've got a note saying the site's moved, and a single link to download my user playlist. Had that been the focus of why I used MusicMobs, that'd have been okay, but I would have preferred it if I could have been given the option to say... download my own generated pages as HTML and host them elsewhere. Maybe I could even utilize the software from MusicMobs or Last.fm and simply point them to the new page, continuing to synchronize my stats.
But it looks like it wasn't meant to be. For the want of a single developer, an entire site was lost. While I still like Last.fm, I hate seeing others I like just go away without warning. Word to the wise would be to go backup your user files at services not named Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Apple. On second thought, back those up too. You never know.