Welcome back!
Anybody remember Thoof? Well, it won't be too long before most people answer that question with "What's a Thoof?". In fact, in spite of the fact that when I first started using it Thoof was a very busy site, busy enough to keep it's servers running on turbo boost most of the time.
More than once, the little Thoof badges they wanted people to put on articles submitted to their service would hold up a page because they were timing out instead of loading. I suppose in retrospect, that is probably one of the first signs of it's impending doom.
I got to where I was using the service less and less. They had made it more complicated and involved to submit a story to them. I realize that they had to do something to combat spam but it got so bad that it just wasn't worth the effort anymore. Another reason is the results I got from the site in terms of traffic.
When I first started using thoof it produced a reasonable amount of traffic, at least, enough to be easily noticeable on Statcounter when I would look at where hits were coming from. Somewhere about four to six months ago traffic coming from Thoof dropped low enough that I never saw it in Statcounter anymore.
Another problem with Thoof is that the content, in spite of their best efforts, went to hell. The last time I was on the site there was very little of interest in amid the posts about nude pics of this or that celebrity and suchlike.
So I guess it shouldn't have been much of a surprise when, out of morbid curiosity, I went to look to see if there was anything worth bothering with. When I typed thoof.com into my browser I was actually surprised to see that it's been redirected to reddit.com.
Doing some looking around I found "Another Personalized News Site Bites The Dust" on TechCrunch that pretty much qualifies as Thoof's eulogy.
So, If you've got those "Thoof This" buttons and widgets on your site or blog it's time to take them down. Thoof is no more.
Technorati Tags: news site, thoof, personalized news, digg clone, ian clarke
