Blue Screen Of Duds

After the unconventional ways of Jonathan Schwartz (Sun’s CEO), who’s kept up his blogging efforts even after being bumped up to the post rather admirably (albeit in a less interesting manner ever since) and Alan Meckler (CEO, Jupiter Media) who is not half an interesting a blogger as the former is, we now have Mårten Mickos (CEO, MySQL AB) battling the hordes in the very unfriendly waters of Slashdot. I quite like the openness in these conversations, though I have to wonder how long it would be (basically around the time till they list) before Mårten would also be snowed under the numerous directives issued by the attorneys and the shadow of the infamous SOX. It is an interesting thread to follow all the same.

The recently-launched AOL India has to be one of the greatest letdowns in terms of new online launches in India. The production quality is so mediocre that it looks like someone took the US version of the portal and made a cheap Indianised version of it — more like a fake Tommy or a D&G. It kind of, sort of looks the same, but that’s where the similarity ends. It looks like in their rush to release the product, AOL has made the error of bringing out a half-baked product, which is almost an insult to the users.

From the early announcements and noises coming from their Bangalore office, the product was to have a lot of videos, especially its Cartoon Network content, aimed at locking in the future market of today’s kids, and leveraging it to work around the problem of otherwise not having compelling-enough content. There IS video and multimedia on the site, but it is so subdued and run-of-the-mill that it is not even worth commenting on it.

The webmail is nothing but AOL’s international email with a bit of Indian branding and I can only assume that the case won’t be very different with the messenger either. Search is hooked up to Google, an extension of the deal that AOL already has with the search giant, so there’s nothing special there either. They do have a short code ‘51515′ and the content and services are powered by Onmobile India.

I was left looking and searching that there should be something more. But that is it, nothing more on the portal, nada, zilch. It is a very simple word — disappointing.

 I received an email in my mailbox today that pretty much marks the end of the naive years of the internet. Excerpt:

It’s with a great amount of reluctance and sadness that after five years of providing high quality, advertisement free hosting to thousands of
people around the world, I’m announcing the end of freedom2operate. – Daniel J. Cody

F2o was one of those last free hosting service providers to outlast the recent post-boom years on the internet. They were different in the sense that it was a nicely supported and awesomely-featured hosting service (Chillisoft ASP too!) providers who did not take on anybody and everybody onboard. The idea was to have a community on the platform, consisting of tinkerers and web developers, who were provided with features that most paid hosting accounts would hesitate to provide. And as it came to be, the show could not go on forever, even with the addition of the paid hosting accounts.

I used to have an account on F2o, but I did not bother to ping DJC when they did a server migration that required existing users to opt to migrate to the new boxes. I think I was among the unfortunate few who did have problems with the migration, that needed to be manually fixed, but I decided to not opt for it and let the account die, mostly because I’d come to the conclusion that quality services need to be supported with money and bandwidth, rack space and the effort that goes into keeping something like this running is never free and should never be free.

I do not know who else is left in the space now. Evolt used to provide such a service, but I am no longer sure what exactly is going on there. I think most of this type of free hosting will remain a faint memory, other than fly-by-night operators who are looking to make a quick buck by injected all hosted pages with pop up and Google Ads.