I got an email yesterday sent seven months ago. It was from me. Actually, it was from FutureMe, a cool website that lets you send a future email to yourself — great for reminding yourself about a New Year’s resolution, for example, or to see how something turned out in your life.

In my case, my self-addressed email, which I had completely forgotten I sent on June 6, said:

Dear FutureMe,

So, what happened with Web Search (www.startribune.com/websearch). Was it canceled for good?

Ah, memories. Web Search was a weekday column and accompanying blog I wrote that featured cool, useful and interesting things to see and do online. The fact that the URL in my email no longer works pretty much answers the question I asked myself. As it turns out, Web Search was over when I composed that message, canceled as part of a reorganization of the Star Tribune newsroom. I just didn’t know it at the time. (I was leaving for a two-week vacation, and such management decisions were still pending.) I featured FutureMe in what turned out to be the last Web Search column, about websites pertaining to uncertain futures.

What’s eerie is that on the same day I received my FutureMe email, Yahoo! announced that its daily best-of-the-Web column, Yahoo! Picks, has ceased running after 12 years. Yahoo! Picks regularly recommended truly useful websites to its readers but always had room for quirky ones, too — such as its parting shot: the truly wacky Airborne Cats photo gallery on Flickr. I continually held up Yahoo! Picks as a model for Web Search and even recommended it recently in a Technobabble column. (In its absence, I recommend Yahoo!’s The Spark, although it can be uneven.)

The folks behind Yahoo! Picks said, “We’ll still be here in different guises, like on Yahoo! Green writing about eco-friendly sites, or Yahoo! Answers calling out cool questions, or on the Yahoo! Buzz Log, sifting through what people are searching for online.” In the same way, Web Search lives on somewhat in Technobabble — in spirit, if not format. But while the 12 years’ worth of Yahoo! Picks will continue to be available in the Yahoo! archive, the past columns that I preserved online as part of the Web Search blog are stuck in WordPress purgatory.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.