TorrentFreak reports that they have finally taken down the Pirate Bay tracker permanently. The reason given by the TPB owners is that, trackerless solutions have been popular now and people don’t have to rely on tracker website for downloads.

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

If you are looking for alternative trackers, you can try out OpenBitTorrent which we had reviewed earlier.

You might also like:

• OpenBittorrent: An Open & Universal Bittorrent Tracker
• OpenBittorrent Tracker Goes Down
• Keep Track of Online Signups with Signup Record Tracker
• How To Create and Share .torrent Files?

Another popular website creation service was, Yahoo Geocities, where millions of websites were created and shared among users. In fact, Geocities had a cult following from different sectors, including lay users who just wanted to put personal information, budding writers, software developers and even software pirates.

Sadly two of the most popular services will no longer be available. Yahoo Briefcase closed down operations earlier this year, on 30th March 2009. Yahoo Geocities will be closed down tomorrow on 26th October 2009.

In today’s age, not many people will be affected by this closure, since creating a website is cheap, and users get unlimited web storage and domains names for dirt cheap. However, the legacy of Geocities will always continue to live a long life, among early Internet adopters.

Computer World reports that, a team of people are trying their best to archive all the treasures hosted on Geocities, which contains around 10 Terabytes of information. It would be really sad, if that much amount of information, disappeared from web archives. The Archive team is doing a really commendable job of protecting that information.

Did you ever have a Geocities account? What is your take on them closing down a hugely popular service?

You might also like:

• Geocities Dies, XKCD Pays Homage With a Redesign
• Yahoo Briefcase Shutting Down on March 30 2009, Backup Your Files Now
• Find The Best Easter Eggs From Across The Internet
• Yahoo Mail To Add RSS Reader To Deadpool [Two In A Row Now]

The reason for removing support for video units was given as lack of performance, though I haven’t personally tried out Google AdSense video units, if you have tried it out on your website, do give me your feedback on how it has worked out for you.

The Google AdSense email sent out to publishers state this:

We’re writing to let you know that we’ll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we’ve found that it hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped, so we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites.

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

If you are a AdSense publisher who has been using video units, make sure to change remove the ad codes.

You might also like:

• Google Asking AdSense Publishers To Change Site Privacy Policy
• New Google AdSense Format Allows Users To Search Advertisers
• Google Adsense login page redesigned
• Adsense gets more rules, no adsense below menus

Yahoo Briefcase provided users with 30MB of free online storage space, which wouldn’t fit more than a few files today, however back in the day, those free 30MBs were definitely quite a lot.

Yahoo Briefcase is going to join the deadpool soon and will be closing down on March 30th 2009, we wanted to remind our readers to download and backup your data, on or before that date, if you do not want to lose the data hosted at Yahoo Briefcase.

The information about the closure has been circulated through a mass email to users, content of which can be seen in the image below.

Ironically this is not the first Yahoo service that is being shut down, and neither will it be the last, according to the trends from the big three Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, they have been creating new services at a faster pace, and have been shutting down quite a few too along the line.

If you are a Yahoo Briefcase user, act fast and download your files, before they are permanently deleted with this service.

You might also like:

• Backup Your Files to FTP Server Using Command Line
• Backup Google Docs Files
• RIP Geocities: We Loved You
• Backup and Secure Your Files With Norton Backup, 5 Accounts Giveaway Worth $49.99 each [Birthday Bash]

The Yahoo Mail blog broke the news that Feeds will no longer be available in the new Yahoo Mail and is going to join the deadpool.

Though I have never used the in-built RSS feeds in Yahoo mail, I am pretty sure many users have become used to it, and it like the couple of deadpools from Yahoo today, we are wondering how many more will be scraped off.

Yahoo does not have a great reputation of pursing projects to the core like Google which have completed most of their projects they have worked on, what with they dumping projects one after another, remember Yahoo Mash?

Also another problem with Yahoo has been the fact that create projects that internally compete with each other, for example their social networking platform 360 and Mash.

Though these last couple of announcements did not exactly mean that they are mending their ways with regards to competing applications, we are definitely going to see a few more deadpools from them.

You might also like:

• Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Go
• Yahoo Mail To Get Applications Support And A Smarter Inbox
• Yahoo Discontinues Yahoo Messenger for Vista
• Google Reader Adds Auto-Translation Tools

The Yahoo Messenger Blog posted earlier today:

As of today, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista will no longer be available for download from the Yahoo! Messenger website. We have discontinued stand-alone releases of the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista application in order to focus on delivering one Windows experience that is optimized for all Windows users.

This decision will help us increase efficiencies on our team and deliver one consistent, full-featured product for all of our Windows users.

This is definitely bad news, since Yahoo Messenger for Vista was a pretty slick application and except for the missing webcam support it was almost as good as the current Yahoo versions.

Though Yahoo has stopped the distribution of Yahoo Messenger for Vista, we have uploaded the latest version of the application. Download Yahoo Messenger for Vista full installer (11 MB).

What do you think about Yahoo’s decision to stop development and downloads of Yahoo Messenger for Vista?

You might also like:

• Download Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista
• Download Yahoo Messenger For Vista [No Official Availability]
• Make Yahoo Messenger XP look like Yahoo Messenger Vista
• How To Disable, Block and Remove Ads In Yahoo Messenger?

Image Credit

This is sadly the end of one of the greatest operating system ever created. It’s sad but all good things have to come to an end, and who are people like us to tell Microsoft not to do that.

So get ready to start paying for the extra processing power and RAM, with high performance video cards just because Microsoft will only sell you Windows Vista from now on.

Windows XP official support will end in June 2014, so there is still some time before you can worry about getting completely alienated by Microsoft.

You might also like:

• Analyse Windows Boot Performance With Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit
• Windows Search 4.0 Public Beta Released By Microsoft
• Power Plan Assistant: Intelligent Power Management Tool For Windows 7
• Microsoft Should Make Windows XP Free To Tackle Piracy and Linux

Here is the final nail in the Google Referrals Coffin that was sent out to AdSense publishers

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program. We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.

Now this would irk several publishers who strategically used several Google products as referrals. For example many publishers including us, would show a yellow band on the top of the page if anyone visited the site using Internet Explorer, this will definitely change with the Google Affiliate Network.

What do you think about this move from Google? Would you be comfortable to run a affiliate system over a referral system? Though technically both are same, would you look to go with Google itself for find other affiliate alternatives? Do let us know your views and opinions about this move.

You might also like:

• Google AdSense Discontinues Video Units
• Google Adsense API for developers
• Google Asking AdSense Publishers To Change Site Privacy Policy
• New Google AdSense Format Allows Users To Search Advertisers

Docsyncer was a desktop synchronizing utility that synchronized your local documents with your Google Docs account. It has been quite a handy utility as it allowed us to keep multiple computers synchronized with the same computer.

Image Credit

Sadly like Google Browser Sync another useful utility has bitten the dust. The main factor behind the closure is that the creators of the software did not think they could make money through the service. A announcement on their website says;

Thank you for your interest in Docsyncer. Our service will be shutting down on June 20th, 2008. All current users can continue to access and use the service until that time.

Docsyncer began largely as an experiment. When our primary startup (ProtectMyPhotos) began to appear that it wasn’t going to work out, we wanted to try something radically different with our technology. In a very short amount of time, we were able to build DocSyncer for the world to enjoy. However, it was always an experiment and we weren’t sure it could be a business. We’ve figured out in a very short amount of time that DocSyncer is a cool tool – but not a business. With no way to pay for itself, we’d rather shut the service down than let it fall into decay as our team begins to work on a new project. We regret that anyone who’s enjoyed DocSyncer will be disappointed to see it go – we’re certainly disappointed as well. Nonetheless, we made some great progress with DocSyncer that we’re proud of. We synced more than 5 million documents to Google Docs – making us the largest user in the history of the Google Docs API.

Until we meet again, good luck and thank you for the support!

A real sad way to end a excellent utility. Rest in Peace Docsyncer.

On the other hand have you come across any other utilities that have the same features, do let us know through your comments.

Zoliblog via Digital Inspiration

You might also like:

• Synchronize Local Documents With Google Docs Using DocSyncer
• Sync Google Docs Documents With Your Desktop Documents
• DocSyncer Now Available to Public
• Get The Best Out Of Google Docs With These Useful Tools