Zootool is shutting down
Dear Zootool users,
after months of struggling we are very sorry to tell you that Zootool is shutting down on March, 15th 2014.
Zootool has come a long way. We have been the first to come up with the idea of a visual bookmarking service that combines collecting images, videos, documents and links more than six years ago. With more than 150.000 users and millions of collected items, Zootool has grown bigger than we ever expected.
But especially in the last two years we had to fight with massive amounts of spam, hackers, scaling our servers and more and more with financial issues. There's no need to hide those facts here.
We got so much positive feedback for Zootool and have very loyal users and at the same time we have not been able to build up a healthy business around it and keep it growing. We are extremely sorry for this, as it means that we now have to let you all down.
Zootool made us realize that the general idea of running a central service is nothing we believe in any longer. Your data should belong to you and shouldn't be stored on our servers. You shouldn't have to rely on us or on any other service to keep your data secure and online.
We had plans to convert Zootool into a distributed software. Everyone would have their own Zoo app running on their own server or computer. Unfortunately the financial situation didn't make it possible to finish those plans. There might be a chance to launch something in the future, but we don't want to make any more promises we might not be able to keep.
It's a really sad day for us. Zootool has been our baby and it's very tough to write this good-bye letter. We hope you understand our decision. We want to say thank you for your support and for trusting and blieving in us over the last six years. Special thanks to all the former pro-users, who showed us how much they loved Zootool!
You will have the chance to export your data over the next weeks. We offer export for bookmark files, which can be used to import your bookmarks in all common browsers and most other bookmark services. You can find the export in your Settings.
Starting by the end of this week we are going to switch Zootool into read-only mode. You will still be able to browse your collection, but you will not be able to add new bookmarks. On March, 15th all data and images will be deleted forever.
We hope that you find a good place for your collections and wish you all the best for the future.
Bastian, Habu & Nicolas
http://zootool.com
P.S. We are really sorry if you received this email twice. We had some issues with our email provider and could only send this email to about 5000 users. We then switched the provider and wanted to make sure that the email is being sent to everyone of you.
