**Note** Please open this link and play in the background while reading this post. It will set the mood.

As much as I have been hesitant in doing posts like this, because I really don’t like to help out the clones competition with cleaning up their databases, I figured I might as well for the end of the year. It is a request we get from people who visit our site and people we speak with on the twitter, so why not? Here is a little Christmas present for the hacks competitors that haven’t updated their database all year.

Recently announced and one of the largest sites to shut down in 2011 is Gowalla. Now there has been a lot of speculation and rumors that have popped up about this service shutting down, mainly in the realm of investors getting ripped off or not getting any cash yadda yadda, but we don’t care. The matter of the fact is that – BAMMMMM – Facebook just bought the only true competition of foursquare. Why they would shut it down and not keep it open, like they did with friendfeed, is kinda beyond me.  I mean it might not be that big of a service, but it did have a pretty large user base as well as traffic. Granted the traffic was slowly dropping, but hey, at least they had traffic.   So the team from Gowalla are packing their bags and moving out to Cali, where they will sit at nice new desks, sip their Java outta cool coffee cups  and work on making facebook’s location based services more kick butt then anything those New York hipsters at foursquare could ever think of.  I am actually excited how this will play out, because as Zuck has said, he never acquires a company for the “company” but more for the people.  So lets hope the gowalla team can kick some butt and make their system totally kick ass. Congrats guys.

Next site was another biggie, Mixx. Now my partner in crime used to jones on this site. “I am a top mixer! I be submitting all sortsa stuff to Mixx!” – Yeah, that stuff paid off.  Mixx was acquired by Uber Media, which went on a bit of an acquisition frenzy,  buying a bunch of Mobile apps & topped off their list with Mixx, rebranding and renaming it to “Chime.In” – again, removing the entire user base and all the content.    Why they would do this? Not sure. But now Barry’s top mixing status is gone and he will have to try and become a top “Chimer(?)” in order to have something that he can brag about.  Good luck buddy! Lets hope this one stays around a bit longer. [Editor’s Note, a.k.a. Barry Wise: I am actually re-focusing my efforts on Google Wave Google Buzz Google+, since I am assured that will be around forever.]

Yet another site shut down that I initially thought had a very good chance to take a bunch of market share with the sale and/or rumors of delicious shutting down was “TagFoot”  – this site was a tagging based site where you could share content with the community and comment back and forth on links etc etc.  Think of it like delicious with some prettier web 2.0 graphics.  But their traffic was  on a STEEP decline, so (I am guessing) the owner of the site just decided to call it quits and say good bye. Again, sites like this with user data are valuable to someone and shouldn’t be just shut off.  Instead put the thing up on flippa.  There is usually someone out there that would want the site, and who knows maybe one of the users of the site would have purchased it if the price was right and he/she thought they could take over running it.

Skribit went to the dead pool back in July.  This site was self described as “Skribit aims to cure writer’s block by helping bloggers and other website owners receive suggestions and topics to write about. Bloggers customize and install a widget in their sidebar or a suggestions tab, allowing their readers to make suggestions.” So basically it was a pumped up contact form widget for your blog where your blog readers could make suggestions for what you should blog about.  They wrapped this into a social media site that would show suggestions so everyone would always have a topic to blog about! Yay! Another site that was listed as a competitor also hit the dead pool – Askablogr.com.  The only other service that seems to still be around and doing this service is SuggestionBox.com, so if you’re lacking ideas for what you should blog about take a gander over there.  Seems they actually have some pretty big clients that are using their platform, so hopefully they will be around for a bit.

So here was a selection of 4 sites that went the way of the titanic. What sites were you a member of or used that hit the dead pool this year?