This is indeed a sad day for all of us, for on October 1, a great app will be gone. Though we hardly had enough time during his short life to get to know him, like the grass that withers and fades, this monkey will finish his earthly course.
I know he left many things undone, for example only enhancing 60% of the delivered result pages. He never got a chance to finish his life’s ambition of promoting RDFa and microformats to the masses or to be the killer app of the (lower-case) semantic web. You could say he will live on as “some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform”. Part of the monkey we loved will live on as enhanced results continue to flow forth from the Yahoo/Bing alliance.
The SearchMonkey Alumni group on LinkedIn is filled with wonderful mourners. Micah Alpern wrote there
I miss the team, the songs, and the aspiration to solve a hard problem. Everything else is just code.
Isaac Asimov was reported to have said “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” Today we can identify with that sentiment. Keep typing.
-m