Scouta.com closing to focus on recommendation web services

Over two years ago we were very excited to launch scouta.com, a social web site dedicated to providing free media recommendations to the masses. However, the underlying business model was always to license the core recommendation web service that powered scouta.com. Over time we have made it as simple as adding a few lines of JavaScript to an existing site to provide very meaningful recommendations, and we began speaking with a range of commerce, media, and social sites about using our engine.

Over that time, we’ve seen a rapid growth in these sites and at the same time the usage of the scouta.com social recommender has dropped off. So, the time has come to complete the transition, and as of today we are closing the scouta.com social recommender website.

We’d like to take the time to thank everyone who participated in the scouta.com site. Your usage, feedback, and encouragement was warmly welcomed, and we do look to continue interacting with you across the Net. We also hope to relaunch scouta.com one day in the future, and welcome you all back.

If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what we do now, and in the future, please feel free to keep an eye on this blog and the Recommendation Ventures website for more information.

Migration complete

Migration done. We’ve moved the scouta.com site and associated dbs and spidering and processing servers from a couple of ‘big’ real servers into a much more flexible set of virtualized of servers that we can turn up and down for load and specialize for various tasks as we need to. More on why this is important to us will be revelaled one day soon.

It was a nice smooth changeover as far as we can see. If you seen anything broken that we’ve missed, please sing out… email us a feedback [at] scouta [dot] com.

Server migration

Over the next 24 hours or so .. that is from Fri 15 Feb to Sat 16 Feb .. we are migrating the core scouta services onto a brace of fancy new servers. So, we might have a little downtime during the transfer, but if we do, we’ll be back really soon.

Download issues

You might have noticed… our Agent download server is broken at the moment due to a really annoying server/host outage.

We’re working around that and will have it all back to life shortly.

[Update: All well now. As of Sat evening GMT all was back alive.]

Hardware failure

We’ve just been hit with a network hardware failure on our main web servers, so scouta.com will be out of action for a while while we route around to alternate servers. We’ll be back on the air shortly.

[Update: 16:14 BST: we're back! though there might be a few hiccups to come over the next few hours as we put a permanent fix in place]

[Update: 21:45 BST: normal service is restored now. Phew.]