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]