Well this has been a fun few weeks… not.
About a month ago, the photo hosting site fotopic.net which Nicky and I set up almost 12 years ago went titsup.com and disappeared off the face of the planet. I reckon at a conservative estimate there were around 25 million pics on there, and since I wrote this blog entry last year we had a few other half-hearted attempts at being ‘involved’ again on some level… anyway, it disappeared (owing to loss of revenue and business failure in a statement made last week) and subsequently went into administration. The two of us both had a think and since our new venture Pikfu.com (which now powers photos.jml.net) was probably at a stage where we could ‘do something’, we did a few back-of-a-napkin calculations and decided to bring the launch forward a few months.
I know the folks who acquired Fotopic.net quite well: I worked for one of the directors for almost 10 years in various companies, and have been a guest at anothers’ social parties in London. With that in mind, I set about trying to sort something out: a ‘rescue bid’ if you like. Nil desperandum, Mr Pyke!
Now, it’s no secret that the site was actively used by transport enthusiasts – the ‘spotters’ as we called them. It used to be a favourite trick of ours that we’d ask visitors to note what train number they arrived on, then go look it up on Fotopic: 99% of the time it was there. Of course the loss of Fotopic was a sad blow to lots of folks but the transport community took their grief to an entirely new level! Quite a few were pleasant and helpful when it came to finding a constructive way of sorting all this out, a lot were not. Passions run high but threatening me and my family via web forums was not the way to get things sorted out.
We also came to realise how much we were still named on Fotopic’s own stuff as well: domain names are sometimes still personally held in my own name for instance rather than the company’s, and the Paypal account still has my name on it as account holder (which resulted in all of the company Paypal accounts I deal with being suspended, another story which I’ll blog about when I get a resolution). Hey, even the IPv4 PI space had my JR1500-RIPE object associated with it still! I can’t do anything with stuff like that either as it’s under the control of the administrator, it makes life even more ‘interesting’ as I can’t resolve those issues…
So this continues: other former Fotopic admin team members got phonecalls from the press, I spent a good hour on the phone to The Register, the more militant spotters decide to post my home address publicly in the vain hope it’ll ‘help’. All a bit mad really. In the midst of this of course I’m working my tits off for my clients so I can pay the mortgage, implementing replacements for their Paypal gateways (hello Google Checkout!) and generally trying to keep my own head above water. Definitely not an easy task. In the meantime Fotopic has been offline for 4 weeks and is undoubtedly gone while I’m carrying the can as spotters snipe from the sidelines. Even Amateur Photographer did a few articles.
So, really, it’s not been fun at all – but the folks who’ve been kind, sympathetic, helpful and generally good eggs have been absolutely stellar. “Hearts and minds” does wonders: you guys are great, and the rest of them can bugger off. David Beilby for instance – whose persistance and eternal patience in moderating the former-fotopic-users Google group – has been splendid. It’s nice to see a lot of the good folks also joined my pikfu-users suggestion-and-testing group.
Epilogue: the eventual moral of the story from my point of view is, I suppose, when you leave a company or someone else acquires it then take the opportunity to go through everything and remove yourself from it ‘cos after all you never know what’ll happen when things go titsup.com.
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