
Ffffound is shutting down - nikolasavic
http://ffffound.com/
======
SwellJoe
My only exposure to Ffffound was when I met someone at a party in Silicon
Valley about ten years ago who was working on a clone of Ffffound ("but
different"). I'd never heard of Ffffound, and he kept saying it with all of
the "f"s sounded out like he was stuttering. It was hilarious on a couple of
counts. For one, he was working on a clone of something that was so small at
the time that I'd never heard of it, and I was living in the valley and kinda
staying on top of startup news; something with no known business model, no big
investment, etc. no evidence that it would go anywhere. And, for the other, it
just sounded silly to sound out the name every time he said it.

I looked up the site, probably the next day, and couldn't really figure out
what it was for, so never visited again. I'm obviously not the target market,
but that's one of the funnier memories I have of Silicon Valley and its
culture.

Also, I'm a little surprised it's lasted this long. I didn't expect it to,
given my impression of it at the time. Good for them.

~~~
hbosch
The "better" version is (and has been for quite a while) Designspiration[0]. A
ffffound account, for a while, was just a dick-measuring unit for designers
around 2010 +/\- a few years. I found through some Google-fu type means a
prolific inviter via Reddit and got an account for like $35, but it turned out
hardly be worth it.

0\. [http://designspiration.net/](http://designspiration.net/)

~~~
mfrykman
Aside from community, is there a functional difference between designspiration
and pinterest?

~~~
hbosch
Not much. I've personally found Pinterest to be a little more geared toward
crafts, recipes, and home decor -- but I know a lot of designers use it for
inspiration and mood boarding. Designspiration is more narrow in terms of
content, and not as deep in terms of interaction and community.

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mcphage
Weird, this was a site that I used to hit pretty regularly, and then it seems
that one day I just forgot it existed? And so now linking to it I remember
having gone to it, but I don't remember what it is.

~~~
nothis
Any alternatives? This is the first time I heard of it (that I remember?) and
I now kinda want a site like that in my life.

~~~
ue_
I especially love the shots of seemingly boring city architecture like this:
[http://ffffound.com/image/913174394559f0f170e9af85417302ce83...](http://ffffound.com/image/913174394559f0f170e9af85417302ce83c522bc)

I didn't know I want this site until now, I suppose this kind of stuff is on
artsy Tumblr blogs but I don't know where to find those.

~~~
et-al
If you want brutalist architecture, @brutgroup on IG is pretty good:
[https://www.instagram.com/brutgroup/](https://www.instagram.com/brutgroup/)

~~~
brusch64
Thank you for the link - exactly what I was searching !

------
fgblanch
I was a user of the service since 2007, and it is really a shame, although
since some years ago the site looked abandoned.

I really liked it for several reasons

\- it was one of the few web 2.0 services wave still alive (around 10 years)

\- during this time it's been always useful, without any redesign nor relaunch
(10 years with the same product!!)

\- super simple design

\- organic growth, it didn't have any pretension to grow. In fact it was very
limited

\- it was created by the japanese studio Tha.jp, you could feel japanese
design in every detail

\- although it's true that there was a lot of NSFW content (specially lately)
it was a really serendipitous experience for design inspiration. It was so
random that it had nothing to do with trends, that for example you can easily
spot in other design inspiration sites such as Pinterest or dribbble

\- there were no comments, just likes (much before Fb or IG)

\- the recommendation algorithm it was very weird, no actual visual
similarity, no the typical more liked pictures or anything easy to find
pattern in it(my guess is that it was not very well coded ;) but at the same
time it was perfect in terms of discovering new stuff, so it worked in that
sense.

Well,as I said, it will be missed. Long live ffffound!

BTW: some years ago, predicting the service was about to close (because of
inactivity and server issues) I wrote a small script to backup the account. I
leave it here just in case is helpful for anyone.

[https://github.com/fgblanch/ssssave](https://github.com/fgblanch/ssssave)

------
jack_jennings
Mentioned this as a reply, but perhaps worth posting again: check out
[https://are.na](https://are.na) if you are one of the folks yearning for a
similar thing (that isn't pinterest). Arena is certainly a tool for a certain
niche, but it has a great API (some people have used it as a CMS using the
API) and you can create "channels" of content (images, text, URLs) that can be
nested/associated within other "channels".

~~~
alexandersingh
Seconding this. Arena is a great tool with a really interesting community.

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yan
Man, talk about the ephemeral internet: One of my first projects[1] in Haskell
was a small tool to go through my Google Reader favorites and download posts I
tagged on ffffound.

[1] [https://github.com/yan/hhhhoard](https://github.com/yan/hhhhoard)

~~~
simcop2387
This is why i went with tinytinyrss when reader shut down. since i can host it
myself theres little danger of it happening again

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btym
What an abrupt end. And their robots.txt[1] never allowed the Internet Archive
to crawl them, so nothing will be archived.

[1]: [http://ffffound.com/robots.txt](http://ffffound.com/robots.txt)

~~~
Eric_WVGG
I have a backup utility rolling at
[http://ddddownload.club](http://ddddownload.club) . It's not perfect, but I'm
afraid I don't have a lot of time left for troubleshooting.

~~~
ballenf
Found [http://lookwork.com/](http://lookwork.com/) through links on your site.
It looks similar to ffffound at a glance, but I'd never heard of either before
now.

Would you recommend it?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Lookwork is a very different beast… it is an RSS reader without the pictures.
It does, like FFFFOUND, have image bookmarking functions, although at some
point down the line we'd like to move that to Pinterest or maybe just Dropbox.
But regardless, I personally think it is fantastic for discovery, please give
it a try.

------
huac
10 years, and I could never get an invite. RIP.

~~~
balladeer
Haha. Same pinch.

I tried couple of times, then gave up. Some 3-4 years ago was the last time I
explored getting an invite, it was around the same time I kind of quit this
hobby of being a shutterbug. Of course the two arent't related. I figured I
haven't got what it takes. Besides I just hated spending time on taking photos
and I would often forget to take photos of good views, scenes, or moments and
by the time I would ready the camera it would be too late. No regrets though.
Also, I suffered from "what DSLR is best at price X" condition for a long
time.

But still every time I land on a Flickr page (esp. after it was Yahoo'ed) I
can't help thinking whether there is any Flickr replacement that is not
bloated and then only name comes to my mind was of Ffffound (I always used to
get the F count wrong).

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franze
here is the google trends graph
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=FFFFOUND](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=FFFFOUND)
wonder what happened in july 2013?

the decline in 2015 might be the push by google for mobile friendly sites.

~~~
icc97
You could also ask what happend in Nov 2011 that stopped the exponential
increase

~~~
conesus
That was the month they got rid of sharing and encouraged Reader users to
share through Google+. It also inspired this tweet, which I remember fondly.

[https://twitter.com/jkottke/status/131434505947979776](https://twitter.com/jkottke/status/131434505947979776)

    
    
        Looking like @newsblur is the @pinboard of Google's deliciousing of Reader.
        1 Nov 2011, @jkottke

------
_eht
Well that was vague. I can't help but wonder why. Is it because they have
exclusively worked with The Deck for advertising, or did they just get bored?
Surely they could find some similarly minimal way to advertise in place of The
Deck.

~~~
misnamed
The Deck is (or: was) pretty unique in the space - high-quality sites and much
higher rates of pay than any of the competitors that tried to follow suit.
Getting similar rates with even much larger and lower-quality ads would be
hard.

------
voidz
Well, I've never heard of this site before, but so long and thanks for all the
fish, I guess. Looks like I missed a pretty nice website.

~~~
gdubs
This was a giant mood board for designers, with built-in exclusivity. You
could see what others had liked and posted, but invitations were mysterious
and scarce – they were seen as a badge of honor among top designers of the
mid-2000s.

Funny how memory can be so unreliable – wikipedia says the site was started in
2007, yet in my mind it's been around a lot longer than that. That places it
only one year before Obama ran for president – which feels like yesterday, but
is also nearly a decade ago.

~~~
colmvp
The whole exclusivity element of the design industry (fashion, interactive,
graphic...) has always been a source of contention with me. On the one hand, I
like working as a designer on projects as I enjoy the challenges and the
output. And I've had the honor of working with some exceptional development
teams in producing things that people use on a day to day basis.

But the justifications for gating sites like this one or Dribbble has left me
with an incredible distaste for the industry because it's fairly prevalent. I
recall being in class and having the elite designers scoff from their towers
over the lesser skilled individuals, as if somehow there's no way anyone else
could attain the skill necessary to improve their own ability. Even my ex-
Creative Director who studied under some ridiculously strong designers (e.g.
Paul Rand) had that mindset where you either had it or you didn't.

In contrast, when I'm learning things like deep learning or math, you have
incredibly smart people who put out tons of free information or books, who
actively help others on forums/Quora/SO on their quest to become better. And
most importantly, believe in the individual to become a better person.

~~~
gech
One's a subjective skill, the other, objective

~~~
mtgentry
Great design is much less subjective than people think. A good creative
director will be able to look at a portfolio and recognize quality, much like
a tech lead can look at someone's code and see if it's good.

------
alkoumpa
If they are shutting down, why not make (and share) an archive of the whole
site, to preserve the works that's been done? Sharing through bittorrent is
free and decentralized. They already host the images, and I get the feeling
that sites in this niche are already in some gray-copyright area..

------
upbeatlinux
Sad. I remember, at least initially, Google Gears having a tough time trying
to parse blog content linked from Ffffound. I'd download all my Reader content
for plane rides only to have missing images. Brings back memories of a better
time; before Yahoo killed Delicious and Flickr.

------
zichy
FFFFOUND really is one of the last true "brutalist websites"[0]. Today's
"minimalistic" websites have lots of whitespace and probably good typography,
but also hundreds of KB of JavaScript and fucking progress bars. They are
incredibly slow. FFFFOUND is incredibly fast with a design which they didn't
need to change in 10 years. Because it works.

\--

[0]: [http://brutalistwebsites.com/](http://brutalistwebsites.com/)

------
AdrianRossouw
Maybe the archive team can help ?
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

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sogen
This is Colossal [0] is a good alternative.

Text heavy.

[http://www.thisiscolossal.com/](http://www.thisiscolossal.com/)

~~~
vermooten
Not really.

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kveykva
Main thing about ffffound I liked was that using h/j/k/l to skim through the
site actually worked.

------
joemi
I always had a really big problem with the site: so little attribution (proper
or otherwise) of images.

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ic4l
Image not FFFFOUND

~~~
ktRolster
They really missed an opportunity for a headline:

"FFFFOUND gets LLLLOST"

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stevefeinstein
Before 20 seconds ago, I did not know this was a thing.

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maerF0x0
Blocked on my work's network? Whats on here?

~~~
27182818284
It is a place of found artwork and other neat design things from around the
web. As a result there is some nudity.

For example page 2 has everything from a topless woman on a window sill to an
old black and white photo of someone bowling. Etc.

Years ago I did development in a small design shop as a student and all of the
designers had FFFound up at least once a day if not more.

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teddyknox
Ello.co stealing their metaphorical lunch

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justinzollars
sad, that's one of my brothers (who is a designer) favorite sites

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drax_
jjjjound.com the OG design inspiration site is still up.

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accountyaccount
I've been visiting this weekly for 10 years.

It's easy to take for granted now, but ffffound was before tumblr and really
before Facebook was a household name. It predates the current use of the word
meme.

It's very much a bastion of the 2000's internet. In terms of long-term
personal internet use ffffound for me is only second to boingboing (which I
feel is nearing an end as well).

------
bebop22
NOOOOO! Why??

