Nokia pulls the plug of Ovi Share development, leaving it as it is

Nokia decided to stop developing the first Ovi service - Ovi Share. The service will continue to operate in its current state but won't see any further investment. Recession is not the only cause for this turn of events.

The competition of well-established media sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr proved too much for the new service. It began its life when Nokia acquired Twango and opened its doors to users only recently during MWC 2008.

That was just before the economic downturn started creeping on the world economic scene. Nokia however continued their strategy of developing internet services along with their devices. They merged the Download!, MOSH and WidSets services into the Ovi Store. Other services are being merged into the Ovi portal as well with more still being developed.

It seems Nokia is still trying to find the right balance between Internet services they provide for their phones and integrating them with preexisting popular services. They still have interesting projects cooking in the Beta Labs including things like Point & Find.

For now, none of the other Ovi services seems threatened and current users can continue using Ovi Share, which saw a significant redesign only a month ago. As of now, all development work on the service however is put on hold for an indefinite amount of time.

Source