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2008 has been really bad for businesses specially when the economy everywhere is going all time low. There appears to be no hope for the next 18-24 months for the economy to recover.

In such scenario, lots of start-ups, small businesses and the products created just because of the competition are either closing their doors or are merging with bigger players.

Similar has been the case with ‘I want Sandy‘ and ‘Stikkit‘. Yesterday, the creater, Rael, announced on getsatisfaction about the closure of both the services on December 8th, 2008. The reason he tells,

While the company and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy’s DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc [http://twitter.com]. While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience.

The third tine of this fork is me: I have taken an engineering position in the User Experience group at Twitter. I started consulting there a few months ago, and fell in love with the team, their way of thinking about things, and of course the product (my Twitter user id is in the low 100s). It turns out we worked incredibly well together, the feeling was mutual, and they pulled me in as a permanent member of the team.

‘I want Sandy’ is (was) a service which works(ed) more like a personal assistant. You send a reminder about anything and it reminds you at that time with email or twitter etc. Similarly ‘Stikkit’ is (was) a service which makes organizing your daily details as simple as jotting down a note or firing off email.

If you read the comments on the announcment page on getsatisfaction, you will see that the users are really pissed off. They start doubting about the cloud, so called ‘Web 2.0′ services. Because you never know when they will close doors on you. It is really a shame for the creators to walk out like that after building a system users believe without providing any better solution.

Though there are similar services like ‘Remember the Milk‘, Google Calendar etc. Still, the announcement shows a childish and immature decision without caring about its users.

AOL Journal, AOL Pictures, AOL Uncut Videos, Blogrush, I Want Sandy and Stikkit have joined the ‘Shut Downs of 2008′.

Do you believe on web 2.0 services who provide decent services for Free, but may go out of service, you don’t know when? Would you rather use a service that is reliable even though it doesn’t provide the services for free?