Cat's in the Cradle: Family Websites Long Forgotten?
Sampa, the start up company best known for allowing families to upload and privately share pictures, blog posts and other milestones is closing its doors. In a letter sent to RWW, CEO Paul Gross explains, "There is no big story behind it, just the simple version of we ran out of money and the business models we tried didn't work out."
RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube.
While the company did manage to raise $1 million dollars in the Spring of 2008, they were forced to realize the sad reality that by the Fall of 2008, they were unable to build the company they'd envisioned.
Said Sampa co-founder Marcelo Calbucci,"One by one [our] potential partners started to fall off our whiteboard, because they decided to built in-house, or they acquired a similar solution to Sampa, or because they weren't ready to do the deal. On Friday, June 1st, 2009, our last chance was gone...We'll be shutting down our servers for good in August (which will give our customers many weeks to export their content) and liquidating the corporation."
Despite having shaped itself into a great tool, in the current market, Sampa's closure seemed a high possibility. Sampa was often compared to the more well-known Yahoo GeoCities service. When ReadWriteWeb profiled the closure of GeoCities in April we predicted that a number of web site building tools would also meet their unfortunate end. As non-commercial users increasingly produce content for 3rd party networks and blogs, the family web-building space becomes even smaller.
Sampa recommends users export their baby-related site materials to TotSites, their family journals to Cozi and their general purpose blogs to WordPress. Another smart option might be Picalily. Meanwhile those looking for a simple family tree application might want to try Geni or Genoom.
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These things are needed, hot day in the fashion of the blog, that to everyone!
FYI, I'm a Sampa user, and after spending the afternoon googling with no luck, and making several failed attempts at blogger and wordpress to import my exported Sampa site zip file, I finally discovered that Wordpress.com's Yahoo 360 Import tool accepted the Sampa zip. It imported my posts and comments and neatly archived them. I have had to upload my images manually, and they will have to be re-attached to each individual post. If I have the time I'll do this. But just wanted to get the word out that this is an option, for those who are scrambling to find a new blog home. I realize Wordpress doesn't offer many of the same tools that Sampa did, but at least my posts are now up somewhere for my family to read. I especially appreciated the privacy options on Sampa; at Wordpress you can only have 35 private readers; you must upgrade (for $30 a year) to have an unlimited number of private readers. I have at least 70 readers on my Sampa site, so I will have to decide what to do about this. Now that I have the site imported to Wordpress successfully, I am considering exporting it back out of Wordpress to a more privacy-friendly blog service (blogger.com offers up to 100 private readers at no charge) using the Wordpress to Blogger tools out there.
Best of luck to Sampa and all of its users...
Always is a surprise how a corporation fall in his projects.
I suppose that many people study the project, either the owners and the creditors.
Any business is always a risk but you always should be try to start again ...
Instead of exporting to all of those different sites, why not try uploading to www.famding.com. The site is a great family social networking site with photo albums, event calendars, address book, recipe sharing, gift list sharing, message board, video conferencing, and more! It is also free.
I had to switch everything to www.familycrossings.com and it has worked out perfectly!
I also switched to FamilyCrossings.com and love it! They gave me 500MB of storage for my photos and it came with a calendar and family history section plus some other stuff I haven't tried yet. It looks really cool!