I started using LookLater last year, before del.icio.us introduced private bookmarks. I used LookLater primarily as a scratch pad that I could tuck away URLs that I wanted to revisit in more detail later on.
Well, it appears that over the weekend, looklater has just stopped working. Specifically, you can submit bookmarks to it and not receive any errors from it, but you can’t retrieve any URLs submitted after October 12th (or at least I can’t). The help forums for looklater have been taken down and I have not received a response from the email link that is in its place.
I guess this is the ‘price’ of free software and services on the web. Here today and gone tomorrow — then you are stuck with spending time trying to find a suitable replacement. Some of them turn out to be really useful (like searchfox) and to a lesser extent looklater. When searchfox went away, I tried out Rojo for a while. But after Rojo’s nearly week long outage and absolute lack of comprehension of testing and change control that rendered it largely unusable, I fled to NewsAlloy. NewsAlloy was an passable online reader, but the developers seemed to focus more on whiz-bang AJAX visual cruft than performance and reliability.
Luckily for me, as I was reaching my pain threshold with NewAlloy, the new release of Google Reader came out and I was able to move my OPML file to reader and have been a (largely) happy puppy since then. Now, I need to find a replacement for looklater that is hopefully going to be around longer. Maybe its time to take another look at Diigo to see if it will meet my needs. Another possibility is working more with Google Notebook, but that never felt like a good fit.
Time will tell. I’ll probably leave some notes here when I get further along with my tire kicking.
technorati tags: looklater, newsalloy, diigo, googlenotebook, webtools
Hey Rich,
LookLater is not down. The database was slightly corrupted — no data was lost but some accounts could not add bookmarks because of the corruption. It has since been repaired.
I didn’t have an automated test to check this and with the forums gone (removed because of the 1000’s of spam postings I was getting a week, even with CAPTCHA in place) it took a few days for it to come to my attention.
If you do want to move away from LookLater feel free to use the Export function to download all your bookmarks — they should import into any bookmarking application.