Futubra, a microblogging service with advanced multimedia, news group and comment functions, is closing down less than a year after its launch in early 2012.
The termination announcement on the Futubra website contains no substantial explanation; however, Mail.ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin had publicly conceded this past July that Futubra’s audience was not meeting expectations.
Live Internet founder German Klimenko believes the service failed due to its functional incompleteness. “Futubra didn’t take off because it was still raw when it launched, even though the idea in itself was good,” he said in an exchange with the press angency RIA Novosti last week.
“There were no mobile clients, among other essential things, and users never came back after their negative initial impression.”
“When you clone something, you should do it fully,” Klimenko added, possibly hinting at Tumblr and Twitter, the US sites that inspired Futubra.
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