AOL Feeling The Pain: Shutting Down Services And Cutting Bloggers

AOL, once the king of all thing internets and free, rewritable floppy disks, appears to be making several cuts to try and stay solvent. Xdrive (similar to Amazon's S3), AOL Photos (think Flickr… but not), and Bluestring (yeah, not sure on that one) are all on slate to be shut down later this year. If you're a user of any of these services, I'd start the search for new services now. The company is saying they will try to sell the services, but I wouldn't count on that going through.

Also on the chopping block are a few of my favorite blogs. DIY Life, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Download Squad have all been informed to not post until July 31 if the writer is paid by the post, and another one of my favorites, QueerSighted, has been officially shut down (no real surprise, they've essentially been inactive since the beginning of November).

Does this speak to the demise of web tech? Is blogging dieing? Are we going to stop seeing innovation in web services because they are extremely hard to monetize? Well, no. Sadly, AOL just can't find a solid money-making mix in the new web frontier. I think they were getting ready to try per-minute access again, but thought better of it. And maybe if they had kept their gay blogs going, they may have had a better chance, because everyone knows that us gays are way techy. But that's why the Gay Gamer Network is here, to provide you the niche content you so desire!