A few months back Kevin Rose founded a new company called Milk, with goals of pushing out iPhone apps yearly. Their first app, Oink, hit the App Store a while back and was greeted with some enthusiasm.
With Oink you can add and rate items, from your favorite tea to the best sandwich in San Francisco. (Oh Molinari’s, how I love you) They claimed to have a big active user base, around 40,000. Millions of sessions and hundreds of thousands of ‘oinks.’
Today Milk announced that they will be shutting Oink down on March 31st so that they can focus on other future products.
I have no problem with their decision. My relationship with Oink didn’t last very long, so I don’t feel like I’m losing a limb. But what about the active 40,000 users and all the data they added to the system? Their time and effort. Gone.
Things like this happens, people commit time and in some cases money to adding to a community, and that community fades away. But what if this happens with future apps from Milk? Users might stop investing their time in their apps knowing what the future holds.
