AOL To Nuke Users' Content On Halloween

from the bye-bye dept

Tue, Oct 21st 2008 7:01pm — Mike Masnick

theodp writes "Blaming an unquantified decline in usage, AOL has notified users it's decided the best thing to do is delete all of their blogs and files on October 31st. Want to save that precious blog of yours? AOL not-so-helpfully suggests: 'The quickest and easiest way to do this is by copying and pasting your content into a word processing document such as Microsoft Word, Notepad or even into an email and mailing it back to yourself. If you have any images we suggest you save them separately by right clicking on the image, choosing "Save Picture As" and allocate the drive on your PC where you would like to save them to.' Gee, thanks. And don't get too smug, Google users - the search giant has put its users on notice that Google Page Creator will be a thing of the past by year-end, although details of the transition have yet to be provided."

These are just a few more in a long line of attempts by big companies to enable user generated content without much of a plan. With so much attention in the space, plenty of large companies (including Yahoo and Microsoft, in addition to Google and AOL mentioned here) rushed out various tools for users, but forgot to explain to them why they might want to use them. For the most part, they just launched them and figured users would show up willingly. It turns out that, even if you're a big company, it's not so easy to get user adoption if you don't offer anything particularly special compared to what's already out there.

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Filed Under: content, failures
Companies: aol, google

11 Comments

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victor, 21 Oct 2008 @ 7:23pm

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year

from your link to googlepages.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2008 @ 8:01pm

Anyone else find it amusing, and not the least bit surprising, that there isn't a comment to be found to any of the posts on the main page of People Connection Blog?

What's that saying..? If a door closes and no one is around, does it still make a sound? ..Or something like that... :-)

Hahahahaha
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- Theoden, 22 Oct 2008 @ 3:02am
  
  Re:
  The correct phrase is:
  
  If a man talks in the woods and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?
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  - Anonymous Coward, 22 Oct 2008 @ 12:12pm
    
    Re: Re:
    You must live in the Phoenix metro area. :-)
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  - Anonymous Coward, 22 Oct 2008 @ 6:53pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Mr. Peakerman, is that you??
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www.custompcmax.com, 21 Oct 2008 @ 8:11pm

Almost seems illegal...
What an absolute slap to the face of those that have invested their time in AOL's blog service. THey may not have gotten the turnout they hoped for, but I am sure there are some people that are going to lose a lot of their work in this shutdown. It shows you how little AOL actually cares about their customers. http://www.custompcmax.com
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Eric, 21 Oct 2008 @ 10:18pm

LOL
AOL proves once again what a dying piece of shit they really are. I know 2 idiots that still pay AOL $24.95 for fucking dialup! DIALUP!!!! More proof that the gene pool needs to be cleaned up. Idiots!
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Marah Marie, 21 Oct 2008 @ 10:55pm

How to back up and move your AOL journals...
AOL did do their Journal users a huge disservice, and on very short notice. I helped make up for their slack here:

http://anti-aol.livejournal.com/tag/how-to:+back+up+aol+journal

But hurry, or your AOL content WILL be vaporized by the 31st!
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JJ, 22 Oct 2008 @ 6:10am

AOL to Blogger
Looks like they set up a site to move your Journal to Blogger

http://www.peopleconnectionblog.com/2008/10/08/transferring-your-aol-journals-blog-to-blo gger-com/
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- Anonymous Coward, 22 Oct 2008 @ 12:14pm
  
  Re: AOL to Blogger
  Ah, but notice that it's Google doing the good deed and NOT AOL!
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another mike, 22 Oct 2008 @ 3:42pm

both of 'em
So AOL is clearing out the file cabinet and deleting all the files of both their remaining users. That ought to free up about a CD worth of file space, huh?
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