SyncIT Crash and Burn

I mentioned earlier that my copy of SyncIT was giving me fits and for some reason had erased ALL of my bookmarks. I was also frustrated by a total lack of information, updates, or news from the people running the site. Submitted a support request only resulting in a database error.

Today I received an e-mail from the company explaining their problems:

We realize we haven't been doing a very good job of explaining our situation to you. … The short version is that our extremely expensive, supposedly fully redundant database machine has failed catastrophically. We do not have enough money to replace it. We also can't seem to recover our previous database. I realize this hurts many people, perhaps you personally, who were relying on us to recover the service.

I guess blaming the hardware is one way to go. The good news is that they are promising to release the client software and web pages as an open source project under the GPL. This is good news, but there was no mention of the server-side or database software, both of which would be needed for true multiple-platform sync.

Update: It looks like Emmanuel Frécon is also looking at multiple-platform bookmark sync.