AOL to Kill off Three More Products

Ars Technica reports: When times get tough, social media plugs get pulled. Earlier this summer, AOL announced that it would begin tightening its belt and discontinuing services. Earlier this month, the search and content portal announced that it is closing AOL Journals and AOL Hometown. Next week it will begin informing customers that AOL Pictures, BlueString, and Xdrive have also been discontinued.

All three products are going dark in December, though photos published at AOL Pictures will remain online until June 2009, according to TechCrunch. AOL Pictures users will be able to move their photos to American Greetings PhotoWorks, download all their photos, or purchase a DVD archive. Users of BlueString, a web-based multimedia composition tool, and XDrive, an online file storage and backup solution we weren't exactly enamored with, can download files or purchase a DVD archive as well.

AOL reportedly plans to begin informing customers of the product closings next week. The company is clearly looking to shave budgets from money-losing products while celebrating other successes, such as its three-year anniversary of purchasing Weblogs, Inc.

In light of dominant competition, though, these three products probably won't be mourned by much of the web. Looking ahead, the closing of some of its most interesting social media efforts to date is certainly stirring the rumor pot again on some sort of an AOL-Yahoo merger. Back when Microsoft was vying for Yahoo, an AOL purchase was touted as a unique way of escaping Redmond's grasp. More recently, a move by Yahoo to purchase AOL has been called simply smart business. Time Warner wants to sell AOL, and Yahoo could boost its position in both the search and content spaces.

Still, both Yahoo and AOL have been hit pretty hard in these rough economic times. AOL's Pictures, BlueString, and XDrive join Journals and Hometown in the recycle bin. Yahoo's dreary announcement last week of a 64 percent drop in profits and a cut in 10 percent of its workforce actually made Wall Street happy--but only because it could have been worse. Yahoo may still have a shot at buying AOL and improving its situation in the search and advertising spaces.

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