All for respecting the dead, but I'm more curious in terms of how you can have 5 million users and still need to shut down. Any commentary on whether it's a monetization issue or more along the lines of "5 million isn't worth the VC"?
I think their big issue was that they couldn't get to "we're the best at X" - there was no use case where they were top dog. They tried to find it - recipes, etc - but they just couldn't get out of Evernote's shadow. I wasn't surprised when they announced they were shutting down - they were pretty clearly thrashing around, trying to figure it out.
I'm a longtime Evernote Premium user and for I while I ran Springpad simultaneously, saving my notes both in Evernote and Springpad. I really liked the Springpad interface, but in the end I decided to stick with Evernote. The main reason? Springpad was free, with no paid plans.<p>I don't really like free services for important stuff like my personal of professional notes. I want to be sure I'm dealing with a reliable service, with revenue to cover the bills, with a real chance to stick around. It's hard to trust a free service.
Ugh, sorry to see them go, their idea of how notes app should look like pretty much complemented my workflow.<p>Having migrated everything to Evernote... it just reminded me just how atrocious their web and Android apps are UX wise.
Ironic. I switched from Evernote to Springpad a year or so ago, because Evernote was so awful. No great loss though. I never really found much use for either service.