In a statement Jungwook Lim, CEO of Lycos (which today is actually a subsidiary of Korean Internet giant Daum Communications), said: “Lycos continues to have a loyal user base and we expect this consolidation to help revitalize and strengthen our search businesses within Europe.” That made me scratch my head a bit, because I’ve been living and working in Europe for a long time and I don’t know a living soul that’s still “loyal” to anything remotely Lycos.

Chuckle along with this additional statement from Edward Noel, General Manager of Search and Business Development for Lycos, too:

“Over the next several weeks Lycos will be re-launching the provision of search services within the European territory. Locally targeted content verticals will gradually be rolled out and we will be taking steps to enhance our users’ search experience.”

If I read that correctly, it seems Lycos is not giving up on Europe just yet. Too bad European users gave up on them long ago.

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It’s been a bad day for the Internet’s old guard. This morning we reported that Yahoo was pulling the plug on Geocities. Now we’ve learned that Lycos Cinema, one of the social media projects created by the once-massively popular web portal, is closing its doors. Granted, Lycos has been under new ownership for years and has been trying to get a foothold in markets unrelated to the web portal/search engine that made its famous, but it’s still a name many of us associate with the late 90’s, when it was among the most trafficked sites in the world.

Lycos Cinema launched over two years ago, with the promise of letting friends watch videos from different computers at the same time using ’simulstream’ technology, which was supposed to mimic the social experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre or over at a friend’s house. The site got a big upgrade last May, when it launched a new chat client and a revamped interface.

Unfortunately, it looks like Lycos Cinema never got over its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. We wrote last year that the site hadn’t signed any of the major studios, and by the looks of the current library this never changed. The only studio listed is ‘National Lampoon’, and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of 90% of the movies featured on the site’s homepage. That may have flown a few years ago, but with sites like Hulu and TV.com offering recent movies and TV shows, there just wasn’t much of a reason to head to Lycos Cinema.

According to the notice at the top of the site, Lycos Cinema will close on April 29th.

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Jubii was a former Danish search company acquired by Lycos Europe in 2000 which was ultimately relaunched for the U.S. market with a social software product that integrated chat, text messaging, file-sharing, storage, blogging, e-mail and mobile communications (Webware reviewed the service extensively). The name Jubii was chosen because Lycos Europe was barred from selling itself in the States using its own name (more information in this March 2007 article by the New York Times). Ironically, the last sentence of that article went something like this, quoting former CEO Christoph Mohn:

“Give us two or three years. You’ll see a lot different Lycos Europe than you see now.”

Well that’s true, but not in a good way.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Jubii, the service was put up for sale in September 2008, but the homepage now reads:

Dear User,

This service will remain available only until 15 February 2009. After this date, all accounts will be closed, and any stored content and access authorizations related to your e-mail account will be deleted in accordance with legal requirements. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Jubii e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.

We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.

Your Jubii Mail Team

One more for the deadpool, and it won’t be the last.

Update: the Danish version of Jubii changed hands to a private investor this month and will be kept alive.

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Below is the email sent to Lycos mail users. The company says it is working on “finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider,” but don’t hold your breath. After February 15, all data is history. Paid Content has the Tripod news. Blogstorm reported the email news.

Dear User,

We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.

One of the activities that will be discontinued is our E-mail business division. For this reason, we are hereby terminating your account as of 15 February 2009. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed to do so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.

Prior to this date, you may continue to log in to your e-mail account and receive and send mail as usual. After this date, however, we will close your account and delete all content and access authorizations stored with Lycos in relation to your e-mail account, in accordance with legal requirements.

You will then no longer be able to receive or send e-mail under your e-mail address. The contents of your mailbox will also no longer be accessible. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Lycos e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.

Should you still be entitled to services for any additional paid options, we will of course reimburse the balance to the bank account you provided.

We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.

Kind regards,

Your LYCOS Mail Team

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Lycos might be one of the last names you’d expect to see associated with the online video darlings YouTube and Hulu. The search-engine-cum-internet-portal that rose to international popularity in the late 90s before crashing down to earth post-bubble-burst certainly hasn’t been on our radar more than a couple of times in the last three years.

But the South Korean-owned holdover is making strides to socialize the online TV show and movie viewing experience with several upgrades to its Lycos Cinema property.

Lycos Cinema launched over a year ago and gave visitors the opportunity to watch older content simultaneously with each other using patented “simulstream” technology. The idea is that half the fun of watching a movie at the theater, or a TV show on the couch, comes from the people around you, and it’s important to preserve that personal relationship element.

The new version of Lycos Cinema is intended to enhance that social experience of simultaneous video playback. Lycos has built out a new XMPP chat client that lets people talk about the shows they are watching. And a redesigned user interface highlights your friends’ media consumption preferences with member profiles that contain personal calendars, watchlists, and recently purchased movies. The site is reminiscent of Evite in that you can invite your friends to screenings and they RSVP appropriately. Friends can also be invited to shows on the fly with a simple URL.

Lycos Cinema is a hybrid video delivery site: much of the content is ad-supported and free, but much of it is also made available on a rental basis (a la iTunes or Amazon Unbox). Pricing is in line with the market at $4 for new releases, with 30 days to start watching and 24 hours to finish. Since this is a social service, however, you can also buy seats for your friends, or the general public, to watch shows with you. It costs $6 to rent for up to 5 people, and $8 for up to 10 people.

Lycos’s efforts are commendable but there’s one huge deficiency to the service: it hasn’t signed with any of the major studios yet so you won’t find all the good content already available on Hulu and its partner sites. Lycos says the new version of Cinema will provide it with a “seat at the table” for discussing these deals, but until they materialize, you’ll have to remain satisfied with content from National Lampoon and a number of small independents.

The video site does have the benefit of being incorporated into the larger Lycos network of properties. Lycos Cinema’s content is given top spots in Lycos search results, for example, and it can certainly be promoted to Lycos’s 20M monthly US uniques in a variety of other ways.

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Blinkx stands out because it indexes not just text metadata but also the spoken word in video footage via speech recognition. The company reported this summer that it’s now indexed more than 4 million hours of audio and video content. Thus the new Lycos video search page also includes the option to search audio content as well. It’s a lot like Podzinger but for international video, with an emphasis on educational content. Blinkx CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me today that if it’s Brittany Spears you want then it’s Brittany Spears you’ll get at Blinkx – but if it’s a particular phrase being used by Condaleeza Rice on TV, then Blinkx’s technology is really what you are looking for. Just search once and subscribe to the results feed, because you don’t want to go back more than once to the site until it undergoes the redesign Chandratillake tells me is coming. (The UI is injurious.)

Google Video isn’t actually a Google (search the web) for video, Chandratillake says, and so Blinkx seeks to be. I like Blinkx’s search results, I’ve subscribed to several feeds from them for some time and I go to them every time I want to do news video search. I hope that the emerging importance of video search will propel them, or someone with similar technology, past the world of trashy content and marginal partnerships. Perhaps this deal with Lycos will be a good fresh beginning in a new era when video search is believed to be important.

To prevent infrequent use just for sending huge files, there’s a stipulation that Lycos mail accounts that go unused for 30 days will be deleted, but for $6 per year that limit is removed. Upping the storage and attachment size limits will probably be of interest primarily to people working with multimedia files, for which there are plenty of other options online to store and send such files, but adding this functionality to an everyday email account is a good move.

Whether Lycos can offer search and spam filtering as good as Gmail’s remains to be seen. It also stands at a disadvantage via Gmail’s integration with the rest of Google’s offerings. Gmail’s tabbed conversations and ability to view a wide variety of file types as HTML are also features Lycos mail lacks. Links clicked in emails at Lycos can be viewed inline, without leaving your email interface – that’s nice. One way or the other, the email wars continue. Thanks to Gary Price for pointing this out.