Highlighting a peril of using online services, the peril being that they can upsticks and leave you in the lurch. Temporary unavailability can be a pain but a complete vanishing act leave me feeling .... somewhat annoyed.
I was using an excellent service a mojiti.com (which now just has a closure message). Yes mojiti has gone. This service allowed you to take online videos from just about anywhere and overlay your own annotations, graphics, sound, video etc. It worked well, you could embed the fruits of your labour in other webpages etc. A description of some of the features can be found on this bbc backstage page. To further increase my good mood though I tried leaving a comment on this page in the handy form provided and on submission was helpfully told my comment could not be processed because .... I am not allowed to leave comment (why show me the form then?).
What really annoyed me was that I was sent no warning email (at least giving me the chance to gracefully extract any of the data I had stored there). Mojiti created some interest it originated in China and the site was completly bilingual (Chinese and English). A post here at mashable.com has a comment from one of the originators of mojiti.com Eric Feng. Eric also leaves a comment on the ReadWriteWeb article here. I am guessing that currently Eric is not scouring the internet to leave comments about Mojiti.com.
Apologies for coming across a little downbeat but learning a foreign language is hard enough when you picked your way through some difficult translation and then find all that work is lost ..... I guess this is nothing to what a business enterprise could lose via a vanishing webservice though.
