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Kiko has stuck a reserve price of $49,999 on its own head. If it is sold the eventual buyer will own the domain name, Web hosting account and its intellectual property.

Kiko's Richard White explained that, 'in a nutshell, we had lost our spark and were letting our users down by not improving the product the way we should have. We felt it best to move on to other ventures rather than try and drag this one along even further.'

Although some have attributed its demise to the introduction of Google Calendar, White refused to blame the search giant.

'One of our biggest traffic days was when Google Calendar was released because we were mentioned in all the new stories as one of their top competitors,' he wrote in his blog. 'In fact, we repositioned Kiko to take advantage of a market that most other players, including Google Calendar, were neglecting: users outside the US.'

Although he accepted that Google had made it difficult for Kiko to raise its profile he insisted that 'it wasn't a case of Google coming into the calendar space and stealing all of our users'.

But

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Paul Graham, who helped to fund Kiko through his company Y Combinator, disagreed.

'What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar,' he said. 'Once that came out, not only did Kiko's growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected.'

The difference, he said, was Google's integration of calendars and email.

'The killer, unforeseen by the Kikos and by us, was Google Calendar's integration with Gmail. The Kikos can't very well write their own Gmail to compete,' he said.

Graham warned that Kiko's experience bodes ill for other startup Web companies.

'It seems to be the first example of Google benefiting from the Microsoft Office effect. In the 80s and 90s, Microsoft gradually killed off the competitors of its individual applications by making them tightly integrated. Obviously this works for web apps too,' he said.

'Google may be even more dangerous than Microsoft, because unlike Microsoft it's the favourite of technically minded users. When Microsoft launched an application to compete with yours, the first users they'd get would always be the least sophisticated - the ones who just used whatever happened to be already installed on their computer. But a startup that tries to compete with Google will have to fight for the early adopters that startups can ordinarily treat as their birthright.'

At the time of writing, with the help of 23 bids, the auction price has risen to $54,251, with one powerjoe1998 leading the bidding. You can see the eBay.com listing here.