Update: AOL Is Nothing to LOL About
I have hung onto my AOL email account the way Gov. Blagojevich clings to that hairstyle.
I've known for years the service AOL delivers is outmoded, and the customer experience has rarely been anything but frustrating as all get out.
But, it's the devil I know. What if I give up my address and the other services are worse? (I know. I know. They're not. But, still...)
Besides, sticking with AOL has provided some macabre entertainment.
For example, I have been able, via periodic memos from headquarters, to watch the company become unraveled, piece by piece.
It appears that all the ideas thrown out in recent years by AOL, which was undoubtedly the figurehead of this region's amazing Internet boom in the early 1990s, have been failures.
Total flops.
And a lot of those AOL flops are chronicled hilariously on one of AOL's own flops -- something called peopleconnectionblog.com.
What was designed by AOL as a "Social Media Blog" for AOL devotees to keep tabs on each other has turned into an obituary page for the company. The death notices for one service after another are now posted in one place.
It's just a bam-bam-bam of a media giant going to hell.
Some of the most recent posts on the front page of peopleconnectionblog.com: "Circavie Will Be Shut Down Permanently." "Ficlets Will Be Shut Down Permanently." "Transfer Your Pictures to PhotoWorks" (posted when AOL Photos shut down permanently). "Hometown Has Been Shut Down." "Transferring Your AOL Journals Blog to Blogger.com" (when AOL Journals was shut down permanently).
And so on.
There's a hint of poignancy amid the disaster.
Though no announcement about this has yet been posted on the site, it appears that even peopleconnectionblog.com has been, to use the parlance du jour, shut down permanently.
On Dec. 22, 2008, the site's main blogger, Kelly Wilson, put up something titled "Ho Ho Ho! Merry...Holidays!"
In it Wilson invites the blogs readers to "Share your funniest holiday joke or story with the rest of the AIM community!"
It's the only non-death notice on the front page. And there hasn't been a posting of any sort on the site since.
BTW: RIP, AOL.
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11:42 am
Dave,
These are legacy products...just like any other company, some things get shut down to focus on things that have better traction.
For example, check out http://corp.aol.com/mediaglow or google AOL Media glow to see the successes that outnumber the old projects that have been closed. The niche sites are a focus and appear to be working well.
For example, the CircaVie product is now being used on Bebo for user generated photo's to share with their friends.
11:45 am
YDRKH, give me a break. AOL has had a horrible track record of acquiring all sorts of products and services or trying to develop their own only to see them fail. MediaGlow points to their media sites which, yes, are doing ok. The problem is all of their tech and services that they haven't been able to do anything with and have been abject failures.
12:54 pm
@TomHandy "The problem is all of their tech and services that they haven’t been able to do anything with and have been abject failures."
...Which is exactly why they have been closed, as mentioned on peopleconnectionblog.com.
What? Are they supposed to keep running a product that didn't take off?
Take your lumps, keep moving, and focus on the things that are working. That is the mentality, and yes, it is working. There will likely be more failures, but success as well.
3:40 pm
No, they're not supposed to keep running failed products. But it's a sign about how badly AOL has handled the tech side of things; their own initiatives that they've launched have failed, and they've also wasted millions more on acquiring other companies and then either running them into the ground or not knowing what to do with them, thus being forced to shut down.
So no, I'm not criticizing them for shutting things down. I'm criticizing AOL for a) being unable to actually deliver services that compete with other Web 2.0 companies out there and b) badly mishandling and mismanaging other innovative companies they did acquire and then couldn't do anything with. And for those acquisitions that weren't the fault of mishandling or mismanagement, it's basically damning evidence that AOL was pissing money away and couldn't even judge which companies to acquire.
I don't see any reason to praise AOL for not being able to create or manage these things. And it has cost them millions if not billions of dollars, resulted in thousands of people losing their jobs, etc.
Focus on the successes? Sure. But look at your failures too - see why you failed and try not to repeat it. It's something they haven't shown much capacity to do so far, although fortunately at least AOL no longer seems to be in the business of trying to launch new destined to fail products or acquiring other companies to mismanage into the ground.
5:16 am
You can also use TimeRime.com instead