In July we wrote about AOL’s plans to shutter a number of services based on an internal email from EVP Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy.
Next week, AOL says, they’ll begin to communicate the news to consumers around the shutdown of three of those properties – AOL Pictures, BlueString and Xdrive.
AOL Pictures will close in December, and users will have the chance to move photos to American Greetings PhotoWorks, download photos to a personal computer, or purchase an archive of photos on DVD. Photos will be available until June 2009.
XDrive and Bluestring will close on December 31. Users can download files or purchase a DVD until that time. After that, it sounds like the files will be deleted.
A FAQ is reprinted below. → Read More
Continuing the tradition of selling bad Web businesses for less than they were bought for (in the vein of Cnet selling Webshots for $45 million three years after paying $70 million for it), AOL is trying to unload online storage service Xdrive. Three years after buying Xdrive for a rumored $30 million (never officially disclosed), the price it is now trying to fetch is $5 million, and going south, says a source. Maybe AOL should put it on eBay. It is a sad ending for Xdrive, which now will be best known for giving birth to MySpace (both Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe worked there). In an e-mail to staff explaining why AOL is powering down Xdrive and other businesses, EVP Kevin Conroy explained (bold added for emphasis}: The changes described below are in no way a reflection of the hard work and creativity of the people who built and maintain them. – Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven’t gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation. We have found that building media management applications within the context of a social experience is a more rapid and effective way to grow the business. For example, today the Bebo audience is uploading over three million photos per day. To effectively grow the XDrive online storage business we would need to focus on subscription revenues vs. monetizing through advertising revenue, and this business model is not in strategic alignment with our company’s goals. We are exploring plans to migrate our users assets to ensure the best possible transition experience. Subscription businesses are so AOL, circa 1999. CrunchBase Information Xdrive Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Below is the full text of the email AOL EVP Kevin Conroy sent out to staff on July 14, outlining the reorganization of his product groups and announcing the “sunsetting” of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile and Bluestring. This follows the news of budget cuts at AOL’s blogging properties earlier today. At the start of this year I committed to providing frequent updates on the state of our business and our plans going forward. Additionally I have said that we will continue to evaluate our product portfolio and discontinue projects when necessary in order to focus our resources in the right areas. In that spirit, I want to give you an update on the essentials project, an exercise we undertook to help our organization focus on the things that will most effectively contribute to the financial health of our company. There was a time at AOL when the strengths of our aggregate portfolio of products more than compensated for the weakness of an underperforming product. The realities of the industry and market shifts in online advertising no longer make that possible. Simply put, every product makes a direct impact on our bottom line. With two quarters behind us, it is fair to say that results across the AOL products team have been mixed. And while I expect 2008 to finish stronger than it started, the current situation is that some of our products are doing very well while some continue to struggle. Being responsible to our company and its financial goals means taking a very hard and honest look at each of our products and making the tough business decisions necessary to ensure the long term viability of AOL. The changes described below are in no way a reflection of the hard work and creativity of the people who built and maintain them. – Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven’t gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation. We have found that building media management applications within the context of a social experience is a more rapid and effective way to grow the business. For example, today the Bebo audience is uploading over three million photos per day. To effectively grow the XDrive online storage business we would need to focus on subscription revenues vs. monetizing through advertising revenue, and this → Read More
The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage. Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first. The Online Storage Gang We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive. Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering. Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices. The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well. Web 2.0 Features Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files → Read More
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