Pinterest has made its first acquisition: the recipe sharing site Punchfork (think Pinterest for food and you’re basically there), which has been taken over for an undisclosed amount.
Punchfork’s CEO, Jeff Miller, announced the acquisition in a letter which ends with a depressingly familiar paragraph:
Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps. We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the web.
It’s depressingly familiar because it’s a tale that happens again and again. Enough that Maciej Cegłowski, the founder of Pinboard – no relation – called it out over a year ago:
Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did “I Want Sandy” change your life?
These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.
When you’ve been given a useful service for free, it’s hard to complain too much. Unless that service has been built up on the explicit use of your data and the implicit suggestion that that data will continue to be available, of course. Then complain all you want.
The problem is that even Maciej’s solution is no longer seemingly viable. He wrote that the answer was to not be a free user:
If every additional user is putting money in the developers’ pockets, then you’re less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.
But that doesn’t seem to fly anymore. After all, the developers of Sparrow were acqhired (one of those awful yet annoyingly descriptive Silicon Valley terms) despite the fact that their mail apps – for Mac and iOS – weren’t free.
I guess the only thing to shout is godspeed to Punchfork, and all hail our increasingly concentrated media overlords.
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