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Turkey Day came early for a number of sites this year as their services had their wings clipped or simply plummeted into obscurity. Here are my intentionally off-the-cuff thoughts so you can follow up and tell me how wrong I am.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]NBC Direct (site) - This one hasn't failed yet. I'm just giving it failure points for doing absolutely everything wrong: Windows Media format, requires IE and Windows, runs ActiveX and a bunch of content protection crap, nukes your content once the time period runs out, and offers no discernible benefits over watching the shows on the web.
BBC iPlayer (site) - Like NBC Direct for the UK market. Installing it made me feel dirty.
Bolt.com (site) - More like music industry roadkill than Thanksgiving turkey. Should we blame them for their disregard of copyrights? Bearing in mind that rival YouTube also turned a blind eye and saw massive growth as a result - while more diligent law abiding startups failed to get any traction - we can put this down to a calculated risk that didn't pay off this time around.
Technorati (site): Technorati's dip this year will hopefully be a temporary blip, as it remains a great search engine. A few changes - the addition of non-core features, a redesign that attempted to go mainstream and alienated the geeks and a Google update that devalued all of the site's tag pages - led to an unusually swift fall from grace. They're not totally plucked, though, and will perhaps make a partial comeback and/or flip the company in 2008.
FilmLoop (site): This slideshow site only has itself to blame: as competitor Slide pursued a distributed web-based approach that got slideshows onto as many social networking profiles as possible, FilmLoop maintained its focus on a downloadable tool. The company's tool became part of online storage service Fabrik early in 2007, although it could have been much more.
Snocap (site): I give Mashable an EPIC FAIL on this for betting Snocap could work. It seemed so promising: young music startup from Napster founder strikes deal with MySpace to sell music from millions of artists. Except that only a tiny proportion of MySpace bands made use of the stores, and the iTunes monopoly was too entrenched to be overcome.
Who are your Turkeys this year and why?