• PaidContent.org, Friday, July 25, 2008 10:48 AM

PaidContent.org claims AOL is dressing itself up for a sale by slimming down. The Time Warner company on Thursday announced it was shutting down a few of its tech projects as well as a few of the blogs in its Weblogs network. In a letter to staff, Kevin Conroy, AOL EVP of Products and Marketing, said that Bluestring, Xdrive, and AOL Pictures would "sunset" after failing to gain "sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation." Meanwhile, the blog site myAOL will transform from a proprietary platform to open industry standards, meaning the brand will be maintained, "but that's about it."

In other changes, AOL will stop investing in AIMWorld and will close down MyMobile next year in order to focus on those products that actually make money (email, messaging, Web content and mapping). The AOL Video Portal is also merging with AOL Programming Video Experiences.

Conroy's team will now be responsible for toolbar, mail, desktop apps and Truveo, AOL's video search site (AOL lost former Truveo CEO Tim Tuttle a few months ago). As Conroy said in his letter, "There was a time at AOL when the strengths of our aggregate portfolio of products more than compensated for the weakness of an underperforming product. The realities of the industry and market shifts in online advertising no longer make that possible. Simply put, every product makes a direct impact on our bottom line. With two quarters behind us, it is fair to say that results across the AOL products team have been mixed."

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