Snapjoy, in alliance with Dropbox started their online photo storage service last December. Today, it has a bad news for its users that their services will be terminated permanently. The company has been spreading this news among their users via emails and blogs. And the company has given a deadline as 24th July to its users, so that they can download the data stored in their cloud. After 24th July, the data of every Snapjoy user will be deleted permanently.
Given that decision to keep Snapjoy running, it looked like part of the reason for that acquisition was for Dropbox to start developing a photo service of its own, with
Snapjoy as the anchor for it. For those who are not familiar with Snapjoy, the Y-Combinator-backed company is/was a great platform that not only let users amalgamate pictures from several different photo libraries — great for people like me who have dabbled in using several, and have stored pictures in all of them — but it then had a wonderful feature that called up pictures from that bigger group in a kind of slideshow, to remind you of long-forgotten events. All of this was usable on both the web and via a mobile app.
It may still end up being the case that Snapjoy’s technology will live to see another day, and that Dropbox will indeed launch a photo service — it seems like an obvious move for the company as it moves to do more than just offer cloud storage, by providing different services on top of that infrastructure. However, today’s news means that it won’t be a continuous process for Snapjoy’s existing users, or indeed for Snapjoy the product.
The news points to a couple of bigger issues:
For those who sometimes feel uneasy about cloud anything, this once again highlights that your cloud-stored data is only as solid as the proprietary platform that is storing it. Once that company decides to call it a day, that’s all, folks.
The other is regarding the message that this sends out to users of other Dropbox services — particularly those that Dropbox has acquired, like Mailbox. So far, Dropbox has shown no signs of planning to shut the virally-popular email service down, but Snapjoy should serve as a reminder that a picture can change in a snap.
And this was the blog post of the company in its own blog:
Hi xxx,
After two years of building Snapjoy, the time has come for us to shut down the service. It’s been a journey unlike anything we’d imagined, and we can’t thank you enough for your support and input along the way.
As of today, June 22nd, no more photos can be imported into Snapjoy and the Snapjoy iPhone app will no longer be available. Your photos will be available to download until July 24th from the website. After July 24th, all photos and data will be permanently deleted.
To download your 450 photos, follow the steps below:
Visit https://www.snapjoy.com/export from your computer.
Login using your Snapjoy account.
Download the zip files containing your 450 photos. Thank you,
The Snapjoy team
Thanks TechCrunch