Analysis

posted on 25 July 2008 15:04

A social network file sharing site called thelinkup has failed and closed its doors.

Thelinkup was previously known as MediaMax and has had, apparently, an involved and torrid history.

Users have to download their files by August 8th after which they will be deleted. A blog note says that Nirvanix, another cloud storage provider cannot help.

Why should it be thought that it could?

Interestingly there is a common heritage between Nirvanix and thelinkup as the TechCrunch article notes: "The original entity was Streamload. The product name was changed to MediaMax and it was still the same service. Steve Iverson, the founder, was still CEO. Patrick Harr was brought in to be CEO and to help raise money, Iverson was moved to being CTO. When a C round investor was found, Mission Ventures, this venture firm wanted nothing to do with the consumer service of MediaMax, only wanted to be in the back-end business."

"The C investor allowed a spin-out to be done, and the new company was allowed to take the name MediaMax and the consumer customers, but no software, no servers, no data. The front-end software was licensed to the spin-out, but for a limited time. Steve Iverson took over this company, while the existing company, with all the servers and data, was re-named Nirvanix. Virtually all the employees stayed with Nirvanix."

There is much more but it's all assertions from bloggers that don't sit with the facts as perceived by both the people at thelinkup and at Nirvanix. Both companies will be posting statements on their web sites shortly to clarify the situation.

It is understood from Nirvanix that the Storage Delivery Network is nothing to do with thelinkup's infrastructure with the exception that some files from thelinkup were migrated over to Nirvanix servers during a software migration at thelinkup. That's because some of thelinkup's servers were phyically hosted by Nirvanix, with others being hosted by Savvis.

It's these files that are now available to thelinkup customers as long as thelinkup application software is running. Once that gets closed down on August 8th then there is simply no route to the files on the Nirvanix infrastructure. Nirvanix doesn't own or control the application needed to access them; that is an application owned by thelinkup.

Previously MediaMax and Streamload, precursor organisations to thelinkup, lost users' files, but this was never, ever, anything at all to do with Nirvanix or its Storage Delivery Network.

The Storage Delivery Network has not lost files, has not made them unavailable, and has not been unreliable, whatever the bloggers mentioned in the TechCrunch article assert.

So thelinkup is the now-failed consumer business part of Streamload, and Nirvanix is the now successfully spun-out business customer part of it.

With AOL closing its cloud storage operations and online backup service consolidation under way in Europe this market is rapidly devolving onto major and well-funded, technically astute and marketing-savvy, players.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}