RSSAOL bloggers sigh over closure of Journals, Hometown
By Angela Gunn | Published October 1, 2008, 10:25 PM
Two of AOL's efforts to keep pace with the Web 2.0 era are slipping quietly into the 404 files as the service announced plans to close AOL Journals and Hometown at the end of the month.
One BetaNews reader this morning shared the e-mail he received from AOL, which included this: "It's very important that you save your Journals content before the shutdown. We're working on a way to easily move your Journal to another blogging service -- you can expect an email within the next week with more details about how to do it. We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you'll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or choose to automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service we've selected."
On the whole, loyal users -- including one of the system's early principals -- were less than shocked. Blogging at Whatever, John Scalzi described the news as sad but not surprising: "AOL Journals, like a number of AOL initiatives of the time, was something of a member retention maneuver...Since that time, however, AOL has moved toward advertising as a revenue model, so member retention initiatives don't really matter much anymore."
Some rank-and-file "JLanders" were less sanguine, grumbling that since AOL management should have given them more notice. And one user raised a poignant point: Journals created by users who are now deceased will, in fact, cease to exist. (At least one knowledgeable user has pledged to at least try to port those dormant blogs to a "living" service.)
At Magic Smoke, a blog written by two AOL Journals managers, the mood was generally one of resignation and curiosity about the porting process.
Some users, though, are ready to just hang it up, as the proprietor of Just Mary says she is: "My first journal on AOL, Francesco's Life, was a tribute to my Father...All the words I need or want to type about him have been typed. Transferring to another site? A journal without Dad (for me) would just wither in the shadow of my past journals that were so full of him."
According to Magic Smoke, AOL is working with Google (which is an AOL stakeholder) to migrate most journals -- posts, comments and all -- to Blogger starting October 7. In the meantime users are encouraged to back up the contents of their journals. People using Hometown for file storage are encouraged to make other hosting arrangements.
Curiously, users were still able to create a new AOL Journal as of Wednesday evening.
AOL Journal was a bad idea. It was mostly marketed as an online diary back at a time where the news was really harping on the dangers of posting 'personal information' online. This seriously hindered the services opportunity to grow, it's funny how if at the time someone in marketing would have come up with the term 'blog' that it could have exploded in popularity.
As for Hometown, the concept was great. It allowed the casual end user to come up with a website with little to no knowledge of HTML. The problem was as design methods change (granulated color schemes, bigger and bolder fonts, 2.0 badges etc), Hometown never did. So while you had all these sites coming online that were more visually appealing, Hometown kept it's 1.0 (if you want to call it that) product hence made it obsolete after a while.
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|After recieving the email from AOL about the cease of services, I immediately contacted Betanews early in the morning yesturday before the story went public. I can tell you this, there will be many more programs coming to an end. AOL Pictures and Blue String are just a few to follow shortly. As for the content provided it's going through a third party channel kind of how WebMD was on the Health page and Jobs / Careers were orginally pushed on Monster are broadcasting on the CareerBuilder network. It's been mentioned a few are interested in picking up the pieces.
The outcome could be interesting yet daring. As for the rest of us, it will be a matter of time before we are migrated or sold to someone else.
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|Hi Methuselah! True on Hometown, though it really has been a service in service to Journals, so to speak, in recent years. I remember very well when it was competitive to Geocities and that ilk. Not that Geocities is necessarily thriving under Yahoo, but I would say that of the two, it's in better shape. Isn't it interesting that with all the gossip re AOL and Yahoo, that one of the two would jettison services that would be redundant in case of merger...?
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|What is a 404 'file'?
I know what the response code is, but never heard to it referred to as a file.
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|Closely related to the Circular File (or, as my mom inexplicably refers to it, File 13), the 404 File is kept in the deepest and most dusty archives of the Web's collective memory -- not to be confused with those of the Ghost Sites Of The Web, which I just this minute found out is defunct as of August. Most distressing...
So that's one possible explanation. The other is that a weird expression my friends use worked its way into a BetaNews story. Which is a little embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as admitting that I have no idea what my mom's talking about with that "File 13" thing. Any theories? :-)
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|File 13 came from the army in the 1940's. There was some form or procedure dealing with discharges, usually due to unfitness for duty, and the number 13 was part of its designation. Like a lot of things it eventually got a shorthand name that was merely "file thirteen". It wasn't long before that phrase mutated into Army slang for getting rid of anything you didn't want. Kind of makes sense, because if you "file thirteened" a soldier that was probably the last paperwork you'd see about him.
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|SWEET! THANK YOU! That actually makes perfect sense now; my grandmother says it too, and she was a civilian employee with the Army back in WWII. I am liking the smart commenters here at BetaNews... :-)
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|The 404 file is the file that displays the 404 error.
So a 404 file error would probably be...
"Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."
Just for fun...
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
"'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!" -
Quoth the server, "404".
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|As AOL hometown was alive and well in the 1990's, I wouldn't call it an effort of AOL to keep up with Web 2.0. Rather, I'd call AOL's dropping of hosting webpages a return to early web 1.0.
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