Five years ago today, Microsoft launched a new site called Zoom.it. The site, which made it easy to share high resolution images that you could zoom in on, or share an entire website too, is now dead according to the website.
If you head to the URL, you will see that the site now tells you that it is no longer part of Microsoft and that it is under new management. Further, the site says the project is now open source. According to the Twitter feed of the new site, there were 1.5 million images on Zoom.it before it was shutdown.
Zoom.it was created with Seadragon, the zooming technology acquired by Microsoft in 2006 that also contributed to discovery tool Pivot and 3D photo stitcher Photosynth.
Microsoft tends to spin up these types of projects from time to time and it's not surprised to see that it was shutdown as the site, despite have 1.5 million photos saved, never caught on in a big way. It's not exactly clear when the site was shutdown but the new owners are converting some of the images over to another domain, Zoomhub.org.
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