So the Wikimedia Foundation is moving to Silicon Valley to join the Web 2.0 fun, but meanwhile a very exciting part of the empire has quietly fallen by the wayside—OpenServing. Wikia announced the site late last year as a major initiative to allow anyone to create a social media website complete with RSS and Digg-like voting features already mixed in. The key was that all the server space was to be given away for free and site creators would be allowed to keep 100 percent of their ad revenue.

At the time, Wikia founder Jimmy Wales (pictured above) said, “People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident - as we always have been - that the wisdom of our community will prevail.”

So a few days ago I visited the site to see if any new developments had occurred and was shocked (and disappointed) when I was met with several dead links and no access to the content sites that had been planned. The idea for OpenServing was exciting and I had high hopes for the project. After searching in vain for any sign of OpenServing life on the Internet I reached out to Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley for some answers.

Beesley was extremely gracious yet frank when she told me, “The OpenServing effort was never very popular or successful despite a lot of press attention around its launch, so it has really dropped in our priority list and I don’t expect an awful lot to happen with it over the next few months as we’re focusing efforts on developing new features for the main part of our site, which is wikia.com, and on the upcoming search engine due for release in December.”

And as for all those who got excited about launching something on OpenServing… “If you’re interested in starting a wiki, I would suggest you use requests.wikia.com rather than OpenServing. Although the deal with the Google ads isn’t available there, all of the content is released under a free license, so you are welcome to monetize it in other ways, such as by reusing the content on another site, or by selling copies of the content produced or related merchandize.”

So while Wikia hasn’t officially shuttered OpenServing, it’s clear from Beesley’s comments that the project is a non-starter, which is a shame. OpenServing was big picture thinking along the right lines and could have fostered a number of interesting content offerings. Perhaps with more of the Wikia family now moving to San Francisco the group’s next launch will draw more energy–and users–from the local geek community. Hopefully, none of this will stop Jimbo from continuing to launch interesting and forwarding thinking experiments.

Photo by Puggles