Eight months after acquiring San Diego-based startup Goowy, AOL has decided to shutter its Yourminis personalized homepage. Notice that the two-year old Flash-based service (which repeatedly wowed us) would be shut down entirely on October 27th went out to users today in an email. It encourages them to export their OPML files and content for migration over to myAOL, iGoogle, or Netvibes:
Dear yourminis user,
We’re sorry to inform you that as of October 27, 2008, we will no longer support the yourminis startpage. As a yourminis user, you already know that one of the best things about widgets is their ability to give you access to the content and features you value from different locations across the Web. Because there are already so many great startpage solutions out there supporting yourminis (like myAOL, iGoogle or Netvibes), we’ve decided to let the startpage experts take care of the startpages, so we could focus on what we do best — building widgets.
The startpage link has already been removed from the site (although you can still access the site directly at http://www.yourminis.com/start), and the startpage itself will be completely removed on October 27, 2008, so please make sure to export all of your content from the site prior to this date. Although we know that this is an inconvenience, you can export your feeds data as an OPML file, take most of your content, and import it into other startpage solutions (see instructions below). yourminis widgets will continue to work on other sites as they have in the past.
The remaining half of Yourminis, which focuses on the creation and distribution of widgets across other web properties and onto desktops, will remain in operation. Elements of Goowy’s webtop have already been integrated into AOL Mail.
[Thanks for the tip, Lee]
Good info.
Soon to replaced my MyYahoo…or MyYahAol…or MyYahell.
How hard could it be to monetize it.. Just slap on some adsense, you’ll make a return.. Why they always shut things down completely, I do not understand.
Its simple. It takes up mindshare and time to support products. If its not blowing up its best to just shoot it in the head.
Qrowd.com is a new RIA webtop that offers many innovative features. Users of Goowy are welcome to migrate to Qrowd.
goowy is a great company {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/5ZBW9ckBEH_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”goowy is a great company ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/BRp4ikfk4h”}}}
Andrew – thanks for your support! Lets grab lunch one of these days now that we are in la.
YourMinis was one of our inspiration when we created Wixi. But we wanted to add much more social features to be able to follow what my friends do on their webtop, what they watch, what they upload, what they share…
Wixi offers the best media webtop experience and enable to play and share any media with NO LIMIT OF SIZE from anywhere!
Feel free to connect on Wixi and use “havefun” as promotionnal code and join our community.
May the files be with you!
Arthur
Founder of Wixi Inc.
Arthur – thanks for the kind words – really appreciate it and wish you continued success.
Widgets man, whod’a think?
very very very……………
They take monitor because some times got ghosting effect of past information. ,