Milk Inc. to shut down Oink on March 31st

What the....<p>I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".<p>It's like ADD at the business level.<p>Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.

So many armchair commentators… Nobody here has the data about Oink that Milk do. The data required to tell if this venture was something worth doubling-down on or moving on from.<p>Business is an art. And great artists know that moving forward often requires you to say "this didn't work, let's start again."<p>"If you want to live your life ... as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away." — Steve Jobs

As a founder of a company in the same space (chee.rs) I was surprised to see them pivot from the idea so quickly.<p>Our internal analysis of share/engagement metrics was showing that our own users were way more engaged than Oink's. We were expecting that if they noticed us in the market they'd have been working on rev 2 of the product - gathering intel from products like ours and integrating it - rather than shutting it down.

Why would anyone bother committing to one of their products again if they just arbitrarily shut things down when they are working on the next big thing?!

I was an Oink user and deleted it a few weeks ago from my phone. It seemed like an intriguing idea (to see recommendations of things rather than places), but ultimately there are only so many photographs of beers, burgers and coffees that one can stare at.<p>But I really do appreciate that they offer a way to download my data as I've done it and discovered a beer I'd forgotten about: <a href="http://www.meantimebrewing.com/our-beers/meantime-wheat" rel="nofollow">http://www.meantimebrewing.com/our-beers/meantime-wheat</a>

Wow...the vitriol to Kevin here is ridiculous (or telling - depending on your perspective). HN is supposed to be a place where people are encouraged to start things - with the acknowledgement that not everything will work out and we are the testing ground for many of those new ideas.<p>The price for being a cutting-edge digirati is that many of the services you use, will not survive. If you can't deal with that, wait until they go mainstream and have some viable way to stay alive. Don't complain about it.<p>Yes, Kevin has raised money on his name - but why all the hate? Let him do his thing and you do yours.<p>Try launching a product and building your own, rather than criticizing other efforts. Either way, bootstrapping, getting funding, pivoting, abandoning is not easy. Doing it with such public scrutiny is even harder.<p>Take a chill pill and take solace in the fact that you are in the digirati that can even see these things. Your mom likely doesn't even know what Oink is. If you would rather be like her, then stop hanging out here and complaining.

How come Oink didn't got any traction, even with all the publicity they did everywhere when it was launched? When oik hit the app store I thought "god, If only I have 1% of kevin rose visibility to use it". I guess this ain't enough.<p>I think people are getting tired of using apps to tag stuff, take pictures, "like" this and that, etc... It feels like we are working for a company and not having fun or create anything, and Oink! just gave me reason to think this way even more firmly. There's no market for this anymore, because we don't have that much time to spent in dozens of different communities, and so,the less populated die.<p>So please, if you want to build something, please work on something real and that actual solves something, not another Flickr meets Facebook/twitter app.

IMHO it would have been better PR to "pivot" even if it is to an entirely different thing. It would sound more respectful to people that used the app, covered the app and those that cheered them on.<p>I'd really be interested in seeing what next they build.

This really speaks to how we should look at apps, specifically those based around social networks. Consider the analogy of an app vis à vis a roller disco. The roller disco was a fad, so why can't apps and their subsequent networks be "fads" too? Maybe that's the point: they're cool because they're relevant now. Maybe longevity isn't the goal. We should enjoy the ephemeral things (so later we can say "remember when...").

I think one of the biggest hurdles to ranking and rating systems is how the data comes in. Imagine a two-dimensional histogram where Y is the number of ratings and all of the items are arranged on the X axis.<p>What I saw with Oink was this X axis (the number of items to be rated) growing faster than the Y axis (the number of ratings): in effect, noise growing faster than signal.<p>They weren't aggressive enough in filtering out duplicate entries and/or working with businesses to upload their catalogs onto Oink so users didn't have to add (and re-add) them. Not saying it was an easy task, but essentially this is the main challenge to such a product.

First line sheds a bit of light on their philosophy: "We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project..."<p>Sounds like they are trying for a shotgun approach (didn't the company behind Angry Birds do the same thing? I don't know the official business term for this methodology). Where they have an internal API/system to roll out an idea FAST, then see if it gains any traction within their internal goal (whatever short period of time they set for themselves), and if not, scrap it to move onto the next thing...?<p>I think that works great for little one-off games. But with websites where people are expecting it to be around for years? Will that burn users too often, too fast, and sully your reputation? I don't know. I'm curious.<p>(imo, I don't know if I'd have put those two sentences in the shut-down notice - sounds like they were just experimenting with the site to see if they could make a quick buck, weren't really serious about it unless the $ or pageviews started flowing, and the users were just the guinea pigs...but that's just me.)

Question: what is the font they used for the "OINK" logo? If anyone has an idea, I would love to know.<p>What the Font was unsuccessful in determining it.

I'm not sure if this was more of a "fail fast, move fast" effort or that they realized it was stupid to begin with.

Glad to hear that Kevin Rose is sticking to his guns. I wonder if the Milk team will tackle a harder problem next time around.<p>Edit: Kevin Rose said he would kill off any project that wasn't gaining traction and he did just that. This is what I was referring to.

I applaud the Milk folks in their first effort, but I must say if you've used Oink you would realize that: 1. it's not sticky 2. it's value proposition is relatively low<p>When it launched I played around with it for a few weeks before eventually uninstalling. Reason being, when you can check-in to places via FourSquare, recommend food/items you like from restaurants via Yelp, why would you use a system like Oink (especially when it has a smaller social-footprint than the aforementioned services)?<p>Maybe this app was awesome for you Bay area folks, but in NYC I never found much when I used the “find nearby” feature. Their interface was also inundated with too many data points as well (see there item detail screen).<p>I think the next wave of apps, now that we're experiencing check-in fatigue, is "passive utility" apps (Highlight, Sonar, etc). Their value can be ascertained with little friction (literally all you have to do is walk by someone) and there's tremendous room expansion on its core concept (dating based on shared interests, linkedin introductions based on shared contacts, etc.).

I think it's funny how people consider Kevin Rose a seasoned entrepreneur... what a joke. Their process is throw it against the wall and see what sticks because they apparently have no idea what actually constitutes a good idea. These guys are clueless, straight up. What an embarrassment.<p>How many Apple products have failed? How many 37Signals products failed?

Glad they are moving on. IMHO never understood what problem OINK was solving or why so many people ran to support it simply because Kevin Rose was attached. I have the utmost respect for Kevin but oink was very "emperor's new clothes" for me. I wondered what everyone was looking at while I saw nothing but junk

What a coincidence! This just reminded me to migrate my SimpleGeo apps; they are also shutting down on March 31.

it seems like they intended to use oink for data gathering: from: <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-milk-shutters-its-first-app-oink-after-just-over-3-months/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-milk-shutt...</a><p>------------------------- This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own. --------------------<p>if this is indeed the case, they should have been upfront about it. This is like taking users for a ride. 'Now that we have enough data, we're going to shut this thing down'

Trying different business models is a great thing. Businesses become successful in different ways. When they announced Milk they said that this would be their business model and they have stuck with it. It is going to be interesting to see how this works out in the end.

Disregarding all the traditional startup acumen (lean, agile, blah blah blah), in an environment where businesses are expected to be tested and discarded within months how will our 'ecosystem' tackle the bigger more meaningful problems that have a deferred payout for seeing it through? It seems to me that real innovation comes a lot more from long hard teeth grinding slogs than it does from rapid iteration. It seems like the startup environment has lately transitioned to business methods that largely aim at finding the most efficient means to get the last of the low hanging fruits.

I can't help but wonder what the cost would have been to keep it running, unsupported even?<p>I knew Milk was going to do multiple apps - I didn't think they'd delete their old ones before they started on their new ones.<p>It now seems apparent they're looking for 'the one' that sticks and they're not interested in building a portfolio of products with a strong fan-base. I would have thought keeping their early-adopter user base happy would have been a really valuable asset.<p>I feel they'll get a less favourable uptake for their next app now, so if Oink didn't get the traction they were looking for they might struggle more next time.

Seeing news like this makes me less inclined to be an early adopter in Milk's next project. Going into business with the primary intent to start a lot of projects and fail until one succeeds seems like a recipe for failure. While it's always an inherent consideration in every startup, it should never be your core strategy. Unfortunately for Milk, it seems like that was exactly what they had in mind. Kevin has a personality that makes people WANT him to succeed, but every user has their limits on how much they will continue to forgive.

I think this is really tough on users. But it's also indicative of Rose's power and pull with a large user base. I think people will forgive him and sign up to his next new thing because he's a smart dude and has a great team.<p>For better or worse, this is kindof a blip on the cosmic radar, even in the tech world.<p>I dunno how I'd react if I was an investor - I guess you invest in a guy like that because you're long on him, and in that case, the failures don't matter as long as your equity carries over.

Obviously start-ups pivot all the time, but Oink entered a crowded space of ratings and reviews. While they got the 150,000 sign-ups it was mostly due to the fact that it was Kevin Rose. I think they realized it would be hard to be real profitable quickly and that people may not want to review items inside places. I think all you need is a review of the business.<p>Plus, its not like Rose cant just move on anyways. He's got plenty of $$ and connections to fund his next venture.

there are different philosophies on when to kill a project... and imho, this was way too quick. By way of personal example, it took us 2 years to build BizRate.com into something that could even get funded, another 5 years before it started making money as Shopzilla, and 9 years total before we had our "overnight success" -- Many points along the way we could easily have pulled the plug. Persistence / sticking to your vision is something that is sorely lacking these days. (Another more obvious example: How long did it take for Apple's design+hardware+software philosophy to strike a mainstream cord?)<p>Timing aside, this method of "putting a bullet in its head" (which is not even a good expression to use colloquially), was a terribly callous way to treat their current users too... Especially given the fact that for a few thousand dollars a month (max) they could have kept the system rolling in the cloud indefinitely, without investing any time in it. They then could have put out feelers to find it's users / content a new home... (For example, our new start-up chee.rs would gladly have welcomed oink users -- in fact we're working on a quick oink importer as I write this. :)<p>Or, even if they weren't interested in transitioning users to someone else, they could have kept things running at least until their next big idea came along to announce to their users: "Hey we've got this new great thing, come on over and now that we have it, we've decided to finally and reluctantly shutter Oink, because we hadn't seen it gain much traction. Sorry about letting you down... blah blah blah."<p>Much better for PR than "We put a bullet in your head and moved on... But, we hope you'll join us again for another round as soon as your headache subsides."

I'm not very surprised by this decision, I like Kevin Rose and his ideas, but in my opinion OINK was late to the game. In a time where you have so many app options to check-in or review things, this app becomes very unnecessary.<p>I guess this proves that even a great design and great execution are not enough, you also need a clever idea huh. What do you think?.

However you look at it, with the clout Rose has (over 1 mill twitter followers) whatever he does next will get a ton of press and interest,probably even more so given the quick shutdown of oink. So why not save some cash and go for something new, at least they've come out and said it rather than leaving it to slowly die and not commenting.

Fundamentally its a question of Novelty versus Utility. Is it just this months new, new thing, or is it something that fundamentally solves a problem, makes your live easier/better, or sates a desire. Most of the 1st wave of apps are (understandably) novelties...its the utility equation that will be the next wave

This is a good example of how extremely hungry entrepreneurs often have the advantage. Established companies and serial entrepreneurs rarely stick with their ideas if there isn't immediate success. Yet most large successes take time to mature and build momentum. Really sad to see kevin and milk give up so fast.

This seems a bit... premature. Not that I've used it. But in all seriousness, if Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook had shut down after the first few mediocre months... well, we'd probably all be better off. But you get the picture.<p>Was Kevin Rose involved in Pownce? That felt like another "meh" effort from the former Diggers.

When I read Milk Inc. the first, second and third thing that came to my mind is the Belgian vocal trance band: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_inc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_inc</a>

Called this one a few months ago <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/zinssmeister/status/155144625382883328" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/zinssmeister/status/15514462538288332...</a><p>But actually I am still surprised how quick this got axed. As a user you gotta ask yourself these days if it's worth investing a lot of time and content into a new app. An App that might be shut down, just because the builders want to go try out a new idea. To give Kevin Rose some credit here, he always state up front that Milk was going to "try" different ideas and move on to another if one wasn't bringing the right amount of traction. Now I hoped that the transition over to a new idea wouldn't mean the instand death of the previous and that's probably the biggest surprise here.

People need to get over this. Milk originally said that they would try a series of experiments, that would be killed if the required traction wasn't there.<p>We will see what happens with their next effort.

Make the source code available; the app and website!

Kind of a shame, I was looking forward to an Android version of Oink. Now it's too late. :(<p>Although they were taking quite a while to put it out.

being a serial entrepreneur is easy, making a huge success of every endeavor is hard. 9 out of 10 startups die, so even if you are Kevin Rose this means you will probably have more failures than successes. Kill it and move on. Just make sure you can say you gave it your utmost best.

First thought: what the heck is Oink?

Sad to see it go. Oink was really fun for the few days I was using it :)

we're helping @oinkapp users cheer up! Here's an importer to turn your old oinks into @cheers! :) <a href="http://chee.rs/oinkimport" rel="nofollow">http://chee.rs/oinkimport</a>

perhaps kevin rose is joining the bandwagon of SoLoMo to compete with the likes of Highlight, <a href="http://LetsLunch.com" rel="nofollow">http://LetsLunch.com</a>, Glancee etc

What is it about Kevin Rose and commitment ?

Read that as oink.de legendary torrent site

"It's better to burn out, than fade away"

Lots of Kevin Rose hate in this thread for whatever reason. Reads a lot like Reddit...

What did Oink do?

A shame to see Oink getting shut down <i>again</i>.

If they didn't really believe in this "innovative" idea of taking pictures of food and posting them on the internet, and didn't have the resources and conviction to see it through, then why will they be more successful next time?

I have a question..<p>How ethical is this to set something up to obviously collect 'free data'?

Mark my words: no tech startup founded by a hipster will ever succeed.