Sunday, January 04, 2009

Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence

Please Note: There is now a follow up to this post here:
Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken:

Fotopic is one of the most popular photo sharing gallery sites especially for transport enthusiasts, which by 2007 hosted 76,400,000 Images from users in 204 Countries.
The site disappeared from the internet early on the 2nd January 2009 and at time of writing is still down!

There has been NO information from the UK registered owners of the company Snappy Designs Limited, their parent company Any-Web, and as for the Media, not even the specialist Internet/Computing Sites have picked up on what should be a major story!

The result has been Fear Uncertainty and Doubt across the Fotopic user community, with rumours and speculation rife.

This Deafening Silence is amazing when in normal times a two hour outage for one popular site results in stories appearing across the Internet News Pages with quotes from Company Representatives, Network Operator and a complete list of previous problems.
So why this time around nothing?.
Many Blogs are carrying the latest rumours, speculation and unverifiable comments from ex-Fotopic staff, but nothing concrete.

Someone somewhere MUST know the situation, but in the meantime, one place any Fotopic User should keep an check-on is the Former Fotopic Users Group on Google, which in the absence of anything useful from the Company, or Media is trying to keep people informed.

Even if Fotopic magically reappears, as David Beilby says in the Support group:
Quote:
If the Fotopic service resumes, there has been a loss of confidence which will take some restoration. In particular the complete lack of communication during an outage in excess of forty-eight hours is not good customer service.

If the business model is proving to be a bit shaky this affair will not do anything to make it
more robust. A single e-mail to all subscribers explaining what was going on would have been enough for most subscribers, although there are those who use it for business who will expect something more.
Unquote
Which summarizes the entire appalling lack of Customer Care and Service Extremely well!
But the question is why haven't the Media, or at least the specialist Media taken this sstory up?


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=57035335072

Miguel A. said...

well...fotopic users are a rare breed.

They want lots off disk space, and are not very concerned about socialising.

They’re very upset, because there is no other place on whole Internet that offers the same that fotopic offered.

An upset rare breed, could be dangerous…but not very interesting to mass-media….

Douglas Holland said...

ssisso.
Your entitled to your opnion, but even I am aware of how useful a resource Fotopic was for those interested in transport, whether plane, boat, bus, motor vehicle, or train.

Whatever you may feel about individuals, there were some successful Businesses that used Fotopic, also many people who otherwise would not have had the skill to build a site were able to provide useful image libraries.

FinallyI wonder exactly what is required to interest the internet specialist media if they cannot be bothered to report when a site with over 76,000, 000 images, disappers?