This article is more than 1 year old

Stephen Fry's Pushnote goes titsup

Shleb tech guru comes a cropper

Pushnote, the startup backed by Stephen Fry that attracted a wave of publicity from his endorsement last year, has gone titsup.

A farewell message on the site hints that the founders, having pocketed Fry's cash, got bored with it:

It was a lot of fun and we made a lot of friends, but our passions have led us elsewhere.

The people behind Pushnote have been dreaming up new ideas for some time, and those ideas have come to eclipse Pushnote, so it’s time to move on.

Pushnote was a commenting system, like Disqus or Google's SideWiki, that was parasitic on other content. We described it at the time as a "hopeless browser plug-in" - none of the other services required the user to install extra software. It also had a fatal flaw in that website owners could not remove Pushnote comments on their content.

The idea of scribbling on other people' web pages was tried in the first dot com boom, but drowned in spam, privacy concerns and potential copyright liability issues - and never caught on. But failed ideas need never give up hope - provided there is a steady stream of new investors who are either ignorant or forgetful of the past, and can be convinced that This Time It's Different. The 'Social Media Age' is fertile ground for such boobs.

Step forward Stephen Fry - once cruelly described by Julie Burchill as "a stupid person's idea of a clever person". You can't say much worse about a social-media offering than this: it was such a turkey that not even Stephen Fry could make it popular.

Companies House records show Pushnote founder and CEO John Leaver incorporated a new company, Stunshare Limited, on May 29th. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like