[Infowarrior] - AOL To Nuke Users' Content On Halloween

[Richard Forno]

AOL To Nuke Users' Content On Halloween
from the bye-bye dept

http://techdirt.com/articles/20081021/0206432604.shtml

theodp writes "Blaming an unquantified decline in usage, AOL has  
notified users it's decided the best thing to do is delete all of  
their blogs and files on October 31st. Want to save that precious blog  
of yours? AOL not-so-helpfully suggests: 'The quickest and easiest way  
to do this is by copying and pasting your content into a word  
processing document such as Microsoft Word, Notepad or even into an  
email and mailing it back to yourself. If you have any images we  
suggest you save them separately by right clicking on the image,  
choosing "Save Picture As" and allocate the drive on your PC where you  
would like to save them to.' Gee, thanks. And don't get too smug,  
Google users - the search giant has put its users on notice that  
Google Page Creator will be a thing of the past by year-end, although  
details of the transition have yet to be provided."

These are just a few more in a long line of attempts by big companies  
to enable user generated content without much of a plan. With so much  
attention in the space, plenty of large companies (including Yahoo and  
Microsoft, in addition to Google and AOL mentioned here) rushed out  
various tools for users, but forgot to explain to them why they might  
want to use them. For the most part, they just launched them and  
figured users would show up willingly. It turns out that, even if  
you're a big company, it's not so easy to get user adoption if you  
don't offer anything particularly special compared to what's already  
out there.