(Photo: Vyou)

VYou, the NYC-based video question and answer site that raised $3 million back in May 2011, will be shutting down its consumer-facing product next week. The company, which operates from an office in SoHo, sent out an email to users today announcing that they will no longer be able to upload videos starting April 3rd. By April 5th, the site will shut down completely.

VYou cofounder Steve Spurgat told Betabeat by phone that the shutdown was primarily tied to the well of VC cash running dry. "A lot of it was capital related," he admitted. "I think in the end it was just more of a business decision  We had a very dedicated, very active community, but there just weren't enough of them." Mr. Spurgat declined to share user metrics.

Despite the fact that regular users will no longer be able to record and share videos on the site, VYou won't be shutting down completely. The core team of five will continue working on custom integrations for celebrities and media companies "In the end all of our traffic was happening off the site rather than on the site," Mr. Spurgat said, meaning that the majority of VYou's traffic came from VYou products embedded on outside sites.

The company had wrangled a host of big names, like Oprah, Kat Dennings and the cast of Doctor Who, to join up. Recently the site hosted high profile VCs like Adam Ludwin and Dave Tisch (both VYou investors) as part of its "Ask Angel Investors & Venture Capitalists Group." Given this news it's hard not to see the Ask a VC series as a last ditch effort to enlist financiers to spur more interest in the consumer side of the business.

Here's the full text of the email sent out to users:

Dearest VYou Community,

Video answers to life's questions, spread all over the web. VYou was founded on that simple idea and generated millions of videos, from YouTubers falling off of chairs to Martin Luther King III sharing stories about his father.

Now, sadly, this email comes with unfortunate news. VYou is shutting down. Keeping the website running is no longer possible.

Next Wednesday, April 3rd, the website will no longer allow you to record videos. On Friday, the website will come down entirely. You will be able to receive all of your videos at that time (more info here).

Through all the peaks and even the outages, the tight knit VYou community has meant so much to us. The VYou team is still together and working on awesome stuff - this won't be the last you hear from us.

We'll still be around, always. Feel free to email us at hi@vyou.com

Much Love,
The VYou Team

Mr. Ludwin (Twitter)

The Twitter game Fame launched just a few weeks ago, but it appears the game's 15 minutes of fame are already up. In a tweet sent yesterday, the team announced that Twitter planned to shut down the game because it violates its Terms of Service agreement.

As we reported in March, the Fame game gave us all a chance to feel like Lady Gaga for a day. Sign up to play, and you're immediately entered into a lottery with a new winner daily. When your name is drawn, all Fame players automatically follow you, and you get a chance to prove why they should continue to follow you once your turn is over. But no longer--apparently the game violated the "spirit" of Twitter's Terms of Service.

"It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do," RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. "I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms."

Though they did not find Twitter's request at all unreasonable, the Fame team decided that the solutions Twitter offered would have changed the nature of the game so fundamentally that they'd rather not have the game on Twitter at all, he said.

"When we developed Fame we read the Terms of Service very carefully and came to the conclusion that we weren't violating specific rules," said Mr. Ludwin. "Twitter did highlight rules they thought we were violating. [They believe] users of Twitter need to make their own decisions about who to follow. Our argument was that by playing Fame, users are opting in and signifying their intent to follow--not a specific person, but they’re deciding, yeah we want to follow that person. We tried to resolve it with them and we couldn't. It was essentially a disagreement over the spirit of those terms."

Mr. Ludwin thinks that this issue highlights what is going to continue to be a growing tension between platforms and developers. "As platforms gain more and more scale, devs are going to find that they will butt heads with those platforms," he said.

For the Fame team, the game was always more of a social experiment than anything. "We learned a lot and we got a lot out of it," said Mr. Ludwin. "It was great that they let us go for 19 days, but at the end we just didn’t see eye to eye."

But Fame fans, don't get too upset: Mr. Ludwin assured us that the team is looking to launch the game on other platforms, so your 15 minutes might not be up just yet.

Mr. Ludwin. (Twitter)

Adam Ludwin, a two-time entrepreneur and now a principal at RRE Ventures, is a fame monster, in that he's looking for Lady Gaga-level fame. But he wants to share it with you, too. The affable Mr. Ludwin, along with Big Human developers Rus Yusupov and Dominik Hofmann, created a Twitter-based fame game that we predict will soon have all your followers spamming your timeline for invites.

Fame, the game, is brilliant in its simplicity. The goal is to make everyone as Twitter famous as Lady Gaga, for a day. This is accomplished via a mass follower agreement: sign up to play, and you're entered into a lottery that selects a new winner every day. On the day you win, everyone else playing will automatically follow you for 24 hours. Right now that's a 976-follower boost and a chance to convince everyone to keep you. Long Island Radio deejay Astra, today's winner, saw her follower count go from 5,000 to 5,172.

The scheme reminds us of the spamsters who would create follower rings in earlier days of Twitter. You'd join the group, which sometimes cost a fee, and you'd automatically be followed by everyone else for instant social juice.

The app was Mr. Ludwin's idea. He coded in high school and college, but turned over the development to Big Human because "I'm way too rusty now to build something fast or scalable enough, plus I have a day job."

Fame took a month to build, Mr. Ludwin said, and launched at noon today. Between a Business Insider pickup and a viral marketing twist, we suspect it will soon have many more players. You can tweet a link and get ten entries for the lottery and five entries for every person who tweets your link—who could resist?

Now that the former entrepreneur has had a taste of viral growth, we're wondering how long it'll be before Mr. Ludwin is seduced by the allure of Startupland. "I enjoy helping others start companies more than anything else," he wrote in an email. And what will he do if he wins? "Plug my favorite companies of course!"