Wondering if AOL Is About to Kill Your Favorite Service? We Can Tell You
by Peter Kafka
Posted on November 17, 2008 at 3:00 AM PT
AOL is about to shut down its Uncut/AOL Video Upload service, a move that caused a small stir over the weekend. But the move wasn’t actually news: Uncut has been on AOL’s hit list for quite some time.
What’s AOL’s hit list? Just what it sounds like: A list of 50+ projects that Time Warner’s (TWX) Internet service is shutting down this year. I first ran the list, pulled from an AOL internal report, earlier this fall. But for anyone who missed it (or perhaps was distracted by, say, the collapse of the world’s economy) I’m re-running it at the end of this post.
Note that a lot of these cuts are just different components of the same project. I’m assuming that’s because this list, which comes from an internal AOL PowerPoint, is supposed to convince someone that AOL is cutting lots of dead weight. So there’s some grade inflation going on here. And least one of these cuts is confusing — for more information about AOL’s relationship, or lack thereof, with Magnify.net, see this story.
But some AOL users are going to be or have already lost features they really cared about. The folks who use AOL’s message boards, for instance, are quite despondent. There is an upside for a few people, though — the handful of startups that have been able to capitalize on the void AOL is leaving.
In the case of the uploaded video service, for instance, AOL is recommending that people use Motionbox, a startup run by my neighbor Chris O’Brien. Even if you’re not an AOL video uploader, it’s worth checking out Motionbox’s freemium service: Basic uploading storage and distribution are free, and unlimited uploads are $30 a year.
And if you happen to have, say, compelling footage of your child doing something that is simultaneously embarrassing and amusing, Motionbox will let you take a 15-second excerpt of said footage and turn it into a cool paper flipbook for $8.99. I just bought four for holiday presents.
The Hit List:
Video/radio/Winamp
UnCut brand
HiQ
Fugu
Windows Media Streaming
AOL Video 10ft
10ft on 2, HiQ
AMoD on MCE
AMoD on TWC
Video Commerce
Predixis on Winamp
Ceased ingesting 3rd party videos
AOL Video DRM
Onstream
2CMedia Productions
UnCut on Mobile
UnCut Payloaders
HP IP enabled TVs
Magnify.net
Direct File Downloader
H.264
Userplane enabled-syndicated video player
New content management and ingestion system
Messaging/social platforms/homepages/toolbars/personal media/community
Transition US Chinese Portal
AIM Today
ADP-based AOL.com Apps
Transition AOL Pictures to Bluestring
AOL Hometown
ICQ Universe and ICQ Labs
ICQ2Go Java version
ICQ Pro, ICQ Lite, ICQ 4, ICQ 5, ICQ 5.1
Older AIM clients
Old ICQ Welcome Screen
Journals
FDO Chat
10″ Vista Applications
UNPT-based welcome screens
Big Bowl-based AIM dashboard
AOL message boards
X-Drive Desktop
Desktop & safety
OpenRide
AOL 8.0 and AOL 8.0+ support*
AOL 9.0 – Bunker Hill support*
AOL 9.0 Optimized – Thailand support*
Active virus shield (Kaspersky)
Free anti-virus (legacy McAfee)
Safe search & surf
Computer check-up
Mobile
Legacy WAP portal
WAP 1.0 portal
Email
Old Webmail product and infrastructure (Atlas)
AOL communicator mail client
Old mobile mail product and infrastructure (PigeonMail)
Old calendar product and infrastructure (Tardis)
Old sync infrastructure
Voice
Aim phoneline
*Apps still run
Comments
I don’t have any favorites, but notice that AOL, MSN and Yahoo are all trimming things that either already or have a potential to take up lots of disk space. Xdrive, group messaging, etc. but don’t already have a lot of traction. MSN has something similar to Xdrive, but Google held off (maybe wisely).
This is exactly what happened in the 2000 time frame and I remember getting the same flurry of notices that my “stuff” had to be moved or it would be lost forever.
Maybe next time around these companies will decide to put monetizeation a bit further forward in the schedule. Oh, or put it on the schedule at all.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 17th, 2008 at 9:58 amlet’s revise the list and just say
discontinue these:
1) AOL
Posted by Sam Harrison at November 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pmPeter,
Please get this straight. There is no confirmation whatsoever from AOL, the AOL rumor mill or anyone else that AOL is shutting down the message boards now or in the future. Several AOLers left comments on the article you linked to about it (or on another article Henry wrote on the topic, at least) stating the exact opposite, and I’m throwing my chips down with them.
The accepted explanation for the message boards being on the list is that AOL, as most people familiar with the story will agree, began shutting down the *FDO* version of them over a year ago. As far as anyone who is willing to talk is aware, the message boards themselves are not in danger of being shut down; AOL simply finished phasing out the old technology for them sometime between 2007 and this fall.
I hate to see AOL users get upset needlessly over this one item, since the message boards are the one thing that might very well cause riots among them the day AOL really does take them away.
Also, Peter, for your enlightenment and everyone else’s, I broke down the hit list much more thoroughly than anyone else has so far, so people can actually *understand* what has been taken away, and what will be taken away in the future. Feel free to read and comment about it here:
http://anti-aol.livejournal.com/tag/aol+hit+list
Posted by Marah Marie at November 19th, 2008 at 8:36 pm