I’m sad to see the site This Is My Jam shut down, I found it to be a pretty fun way to share a little music with people you know from Twitter and to be a good source of inspiration for new music to try. In shutting down, they are setting the standard for how social sites should be taken offline in an ideal world. The details:

This Is My Jam will become a read-only time capsule in September. This means you won’t be able to post anymore, but you’ll be able to browse a new archive version of the site. You’ll be able to explore all the people and music that made Jam, and listen to everyone’s jams as Spotify playlists as well. Think of it as the best record collection you’ve ever walked through, like this, curated by some of the best tastemakers we know (aka you!).

You can also export your data or opt out of the archive. Companies shut down all the time, or just retire old features. This Is My Jam is establishing a pattern for how this can be done in a thoughtful way that shows respect for the contributions of users over time.

Why are they shutting down? Here’s a big reason:

But keeping the jams flowing doesn’t just involve our own code; we interoperate with YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Facebook, The Hype Machine, The Echo Nest, Amazon, and more. Over the last year, changes to those services have meant instead of working on Jam features, 100% of our time’s been spent updating years-old code libraries and hacking around deprecations just to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, everything has to be maintained. Even if you’re not adding new features, there’s work to be done, especially when you’re integrating with third parties. This is why features on sites that aren’t actively maintained get worse over time rather than staying the same. Designs get stale, shared dependencies get upgraded, and things break in subtle ways. Entropy is real. This is no knock on This Is My Jam, it’s a reminder to everyone else in the Web business that ongoing maintenance can’t be avoided, even if a feature or site isn’t under active development.

I’ll miss This Is My Jam, but I’m grateful for their leadership and openness.