Alex Posted by

AOL disappoints yet again! It has 28 million users all over the country and it can’t seem to get its act together. In the last year or so it has launched or talked about launching and then killed off over 50 product and service options, and much of what was touted as being the new wave of innovation for the future of the company has already been discontinued. The rest is following suit like rats fleeing from a sinking ship!

As if AOL hasn’t done enough disappointing things in the past, like getting rid of a number of people who relied on their jobs because the company’s plans for some silly thing it tried to launch didn’t work out right, or badgering people who try to cancel their membership over the phone until they’re nearly in tears, now AOL users who are still loyal to the company (for whatever reason) have something else to contend with.

On July 14th, Kevin Conroy (he’s AOL’s Executive Vice President, for those of you who don’t know), sent out an internal memo saying that AOL Pictures and a few other things â€“ XDrive, BlueString, and MyMobile â€“ were going bye-bye. Just leaving. Why? Simple. And the same reason that any business gets rid of anything â€“ it’s not pulling in the huge sacks full of dollars that the company thought it would back when it launched. It doesn’t seem to matter that a lot of people like this service and use it, or that there are a lot more AOL members who might be enticed to use it in the future if it was marketed to them properly. AOL users would probably be pretty disappointed about the disappearance of their photo site â€“ if they knew.

Conveniently, there is no mention on the actual Website (http://pictures.aol.com/) that the service is shutting down. Not even a hint hidden somewhere in a corner or a little tidbit of info stuck down in all that fine print along the bottom. Instead, the site offers to log you in or sign you up for a free account if you don’t already have one, and invites you to do more with your pictures and check out BlueString (also leaving). You’d think that a site that has a number of users who rely on it and was going away in the very near future would make some mention of it, but hey, thatâ€™s just AOL

for ya.

Thankfully, there’s a solution. Here’s what you do. Download Migratr and move your photos away from AOL Pictures, and to something that will still be there for you the next time you want to look at or share those photos. Migratr is a desktop application that’s designed to take photos from one sharing site and put them on another one, along with all the titles, tags and captions you’ve added to them, along with the albums you organized them by. Then the next time AOL gets a bright idea and launches a photo sharing site and then yanks it away just a few short months later, users will be better prepared. In the meantime, AOL users â€“ let’s get those photos moved!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/24/full-text-of-aol-email-xdrive-aol-pictures-mymobile-and-bluestring-to-shut-down/

http://www.callingshotgun.net/about/migratr





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