America OnLine (AOL) killed their blogging service – actually, all their Hometown sites – last September and I only just noticed.
AOL didn’t kill it cleanly. They could have offered 301 Moved Permanently redirects to users’ new hosting (good – maybe no interruption to users), returning a 404 Not Found with an explanation (OK – software like RSS readers would detect the serious problem) or even simply taking the hostname offline (bad, but better than what they did). Instead, AOL 301-redirected everyone to a page on their own journal (which hasn’t closed down) to “sincerely apologize for any inconvenience”. It wouldn’t have been so much inconvenience if it had been closed down cleanly.
I was only reading one journal there (Pripensulo) which I can’t find anywhere else, but I’m surprised by the incompetent webmastering. AOL’s webmasters run managing massive (if bland) websites, after all, and if they’re smart enough to do a 301 redirect to their apology, then they’re smart enough to do a useful redirect or a 404 Not Found. Why didn’t they? Don’t they care about their users? Are they trying to take SEO points from all their users and give them to People Connection?
One Response to journals.aol.com closure botched