Goowy acquired by AOL!

We have been working closely in partnership with AOL since early 2007. During this time, we've had an opportunity to see AOL grow and evolve as a company. For this reason, among others, we're thrilled to announce that AOL has acquired Goowy. We are all incredibly excited about the opportunity to be part of the AOL team.

AOL's vision and focus on consumer engagement, content and advertising align directly with our suite of products.  As a part of AOL we will have access to an amazing array of resources, which will enable us to continue the advancement of our syndication and analytics platform, while creating more dynamic widget experiences for our clients and end users.

We have had so many great conversations with AOL about enhancing the user experience, delivering relevant content, increasing engagement and breaking glass, which we can't wait to share with you over the coming months. We could not be more excited about the opportunity in front of us to be part of the continued success of a leading global company.

When we first started Goowy in 2004, we wanted to do something that would have scale; that would touch lots of people; that would deliver new and exciting experiences. With the acquisition we are confident that our dream will be achieved. Stay tuned to see what's next.

A few parting promises…

•  We will not become suits (or wear them unless it's a wedding)
•  We will continue to innovate and build great products
•  We will remain focused on our users
•  We will make a difference

 Thanks for all of your support!

 

Comments

[Stefano]

I'm happy:AOL is a great Company.
Now,Goowy must have more features.Right?

[salary Xpert]

congrats

it wont be easy as a small team to be integrated in such a huge company

[Ty from Rescue]

Congrats guys! Just randomly checking out Mashable and noticed some big news a familiar app on the frontpage. ;)

Bigger office space? :p

[Atomic1fire]

Will Goowy be Aol compatible (meaning forcing the non aol users to switch to aol accounts or just converting from goowy to aol
or Will Aol users be able to use Goowy at all
Im Hoping for OpenID support because that would allow aol users to use goowy without forcing anything on the rest of us
(maybe even allowing existing users to tie in using their Aol or other openid service (hopefully including yahoo) if they want.

[Brett Hill]

Alex,

Congratulations! This is great news for Goowy and the partnership just makes a lot of sense. Thanks for spending the time on the phone with me about EmergiLink some time ago. We would have liked to partner with you at the time but now I understand why if wouldn't work out.

Best of luck to you and your group. It's always great to see these success stories!

Brett

[Avguste Antonov]

Hello
I am not sure how I feel about this deal.
I will be happy if you start adding more features,more email tools and such

[Rebeca]

Congratulations. Hopefully, this means you will be adding more things to the goowy webtop too, specially access through pop3 and/or imap since we've been waiting for that for a while.

[tom]

it is a bit ironic that aol now owns goowy but goowy does not support aim protocol. instead it works with gtalk, msn, and yahoo.

[Firewalker]

I'm not very happy about this. I've never liked AOL since the time a few years ago when I tried to cancel my account and I had such a hard time with AOL support. I've tried to stay away from AOL, which was why I signed up with Goowy in the first place. I get the feeling this will be another headache for end users now that AOL has taken over. And I really liked my Goowy account too. :-(

[Craig]

does this mean that my email address will change? I really can't afford to lose this address.. that would be my biggest disappointment. I hope they retain support for our goowy.com extensions.

[Dan C]

Not happy about this at all, mainly because AOL are hopeless at everything they try to do. I sincerely hope goowy doesn't become the next feature in a long line of disappointments.

[Noone]

bullshit, you're not going to do anything else. Goowy is the same about 1 year ago, no improvements no new stuff. What will you bring with aol? listen man, many websites were acquired by Yahoo, microsoft or aol, and didn't make any change, nothing, those websites became ghosts and nothing else. No development. Do you expect to integrate goowy flash stuff in aol webmail? you're kidding aren't you? AOl is expecting to use microsoft's Silverlight for the webmail, don't you know that Silverlight is direct concurrent to adobe flash?? Bullshit, I knew you'were preparing something thoses latest months but why not tell us before. man, even in the page of goowy we read "copyright 2006 goowy media, inc. all rights reserved." 2006 is 2 years ago. Bullshit, what about the flash stuff you created, DO YOU HAVE A PLAN? i don't think so, you're just excited to integrate aol. you don't know that you won't be free to program what you want, and use it as you/we want. Bullshit. two advises, don't lose your creativity if you think you have one already, and don't be too attracted by aol, after two months you'll may face many problems and you won't be excited anymore. good luck guys, don't take it as an insult, I really appreciate your work, and i'm just freaking out about what can happen.

[mattdh01]

When will I be able to create an account?

[Firewalker]

You got to be kidding me!! Please tell me the rumours are wrong, that once you guys move to AOL, all my Goowy email, that I've been saving for years, will be gone?? You guys can't port the stored email in Goowy to AOL's email client?!?!?!?!

That's worse than having to worry about changing my email address!!! I have thousands of email in Goowy (confirmations, business information, contract and financial information, etc.), that I need to keep. Stuff that legally I need to keep for 7 years. So what, I have to manually forward thousands of emails to a different email account in order to keep them? Please tell me that isn't so!!

[Dirkus]

Well, this post hit in early February, and it's now mid-May with no updates at all to the site or to the blog. New account signups have been turned off for ages, long-standing bugs are still long-standing, and nothing new has been added at all to any part of the site.

Pretty sure this thing's gone and jumped the shark. Time to bail out, folks! Export your favorites, forward your mail to a new address, and stand by for this thing to fold up and die.

[Ken]

Check out the April Issue of Fast Company Magazine and you'll read about some of the horrors that are heading towards Goowy.

Can you guys update this blog? With anything?

[Firewalker]

I'll check out the Fast Company article. Thanks.

BTW, I've been using Goowy as my primary email address for years now. If I have to forward thousands of emails to a different email account to save them, so they don't get blown away, chances are very slim that I'd forward them back to Goowy once they make the switch, just to keep my Goowy email address. If I have to go to the hassle of forwarding my emails, I'm gone with my emails. I hope Goowy keeps that in mind, because I'm not the only one I've talked to that thinks the same. And AOL should listen to that as well, since if they lose everyone because people will lose their stored email, then AOL didn't make a good acquisition, since they would have bought a company with no users, since most will likely leave as well.

[Firewalker]

Here are a few articles from February. All they talk about is how AOL can use Goowy to push their online sales with the Widgets.

http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9863956-36.html

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/02/aol-acquires-go.html

Even AOL's Press Release back in February, all they talk about is the Widgets, so it seems like all the email users were an afterthought:

http://corp.aol.com/news/aol-acquires-goowy

[Savas]

Very sad to hear this. AOL has acquired a number of superb web applications; and sadly made a mess of them. Look what they did to ICQ. I hope same thing doesnt happen to Goowy.

[Firewalker]

Great, now I'm not even receiving any emails on my Goowy account. Did AOL take over already and forget to tell everyone???

[Melissa]

The site\'\'s very professional! Keep up the good work! Oh yes, one extra comment - maybe you could add more pictures too! So, good luck to your team!a

[Angry Goowy User]

I am disgusted with this decision. At first, this may have been a good prospect. But once you let AOL just turn Goowy into their shitty webservice you destroyed EVERYTHING you worked for.

Why would you do that?
Why would you take EVERYTHING you did for 4 years and just let it turn to shit?

[john]

Just wanted to say hellou

[tara smith]

Ah yes lets reduce GOOWY and its features to AOL - wow what a great idea. We take away all the great graphics, the flash, and what do you get - A REALLY DUMB VERSION OF ORDINARY WEB MAIL - when the u.s. decided to dumb down America - did you think all of us would be dumbed out too. God you ruined a good thing. And all for the mighty dollar. Hello after using Goowy, people are going to stay with AOL, just like butter tastes like margarine. Ya sure!!! PLEASED your excited but this will not get you laid.

[tara smith]

Obituary - Goowy went to play with AOL, AOL decided it had too many features, it looked different and spoke different. So AOL made it assimilate and now it looks like all the other non-exciting, homogenized web-mail accounts!!!