Lycos withdrawing from community sites
by Martin Belam, 27 January 2004
I haven’t found much analysis of this besides one webmasterworld thread and CNET news.com article, but Lycos announced that they were withdrawing from the free web community space yesterday:
“After February 1, 2004, Lycos Communities--including Chat, Message Boards, Clubs and Image Galleries--will be discontinued. All text, photos, messages and other content relating to Lycos Communities will be removed from the Lycos Network and will not be saved. If you would like to find information on how to save your content to your personal computer, please click here to ask Customer Service.
Lycos will continue to provide superior products across its network, and we encourage you to visit our other Community sites including, Angelfire, Tripod, Blogs and Matchmaker. This change will enable Lycos to provide more and better support to key products and allow us to focus on developing new features and products for the future. So stay tuned!” — from http://www.specials.lycos.com/communities.asp
“So stay tuned!” is a pretty upbeat ending to an announcement that basically says ‘we are going to delete all your stuff in five days time’.
That's nice of them. But not as bad as Granada when they shut down their G-Wizz ISP. Three days warning before all email addresses and websites were killed.