Abuzz R.I.P. It's really gone.....

Here's the tombstone:

On one of the rare responses I ever got from management, an early acknowledgement of some sort, a fellow told me that I was especially noticed since I responded to a cooking thread. That was mid 2001. (When, let me tell you, I was even less savvy than now, re forum mechanisms.) They were trying to get us to answer cooking and auto and a few other subjects, to be picked up for notice in the Times.... these with a certain newsy but non-news value, and we didn't, I guess, provide enough postings for that.

Debra, the writing on abuzz, was - sporadically, the near/best I've ever seen and I am a mad reader - but yeah, very sporadic as it turned out. I mean best re momentary brilliance, sometimes multiplied. I don't think I've seen anything like it, the brilliance and the riffing of it.

I received my last invitation to an Abuzz discussion this morning, but got THAT message. Yes, it's sad, but I would have preferred Abuzz to have left with a little more dignity. Shame on the NYTimes! They should have left Abuzz in Boston, given their total lack of commitment.

Do you think that it would have stayed the same if it had not moved, Olga?

Dan Bunker and Eric Foster were in Boston, both part of Boston.com digital crew.

The last post was by SHOESHARPER, not bobsal, KAK or Zinger and I doubt that SHOESHARPER hit her computer, when her screen went blank, or that her "whole sense of life" was gone.

It would be more dignified, if it was shoesharper, but, how do you know?

Was there a moment -the last breath- in which you could see the posts but not post anymore?

the last gasp, as it were, if you listened closely, was the ever so faint words "more light, more light" as the curtain came down.

Gone with the Wind . . . <sigh>

Gone with the snows of yesteryear.

Gone like the hairs on the top of my head.

As I mentioned elsewhere here, it evanesced, though I tried to say it effervesced.

The thing is, Drom, I was totally unaware of Abuzz when it hailed from Boston. NyTimes made it accessible to so many more people & yes it was great. But look what happened when the NYT lost interest!
From what I understood, Abuzz, in it's earliest form in Boston was much loved. So I'm sorry for those Bostonians that got done in the eye TWICE!

I'm gonna miss it ... sorta the same way one would miss an old freind who had turned into a filthy, drooling, palsied street junky while one watched helplessly as the decline and eventual, inevitable, self-inflicted demise went on.

Sad. Very, very sad, but done none the less, and there was nothing any of us could have done about it in as much as Abuzz wouldn't take the responsibility to do anything for itself. At the end, long before the end, really, Abuzz was but the wasted shell of the freind we once knew and loved.

The following may be a bug.


http://nytimes.abuzz.com/interaction/s.388039/discussion/

"Service Unavailable
The requested service is temporarily unavailable. It is either overloaded or in maintenance. Please try later."

I was upset when I learned that it was closing.
Now that it is gone, I am not feeling much of anything.

NYT didn't lose interest per se -- they just weren't making money off of it. They tried lots of ways to make money, especially business partnerships and portals. Like, remember Aunt Deborah? The Pampers website had a portal to Abuzz. They basically paid Abuzz to display some great parenting discussions on their website, and if a browser went to Pampers and wanted to add to the discussion, they would be directed to the Abuzz sign-up page.

So, Aunt Deborah was a Pampers staffer who's job was to start interesting discussions on Abuzz that could then be featured on the Pampers site. Thing is, people figured out that one person was 1.) pregnant, 2.) had twins, 3.) was childless and trying, 4.) had a girl starting kindergarten, etc., etc. She was given hell, and was in fact surpassingly clumsy, but she was the lifeblood of Abuzz.

Other portals included American Express (that was the last great hope) and a few others, I forget.

On 9/11, the New York Times webpage had a portal with questions -- I remembered this when going back through, all of the "Attack on America: Transportation" type questions. (They were all "Attack on America", colon, and maybe 5 different sub-categories.)

Anyway, the various money-making ventures failed, and notably the dotcom bubble burst. The New York Times acquired Abuzz when everyone wanted to get in on the dotcom thing. It just didn't work out, money-wise. I don't know if there are other things they should have been doing, or not.

They couldn't afford to keep this money-losing albatross, so they laid off a lot of the staff in one purge, then I think one more, then stopped paying anyone. A few moderators stayed on as volunteers, including Eric Foster when he could, but there was no way they could keep things under control.

The New York Times switched emphasis over to their discussion forums, which they still have, but for some reason didn't shut off Abuzz. They must have been losing money all of this time. Dan Bunker did a lot of work keeping it running, bringing it back from Abuzzouts.

This is probably about the best way it could have worked out, in some ways -- I can't imagine the outrage if they had shut down Abuzz right when they laid off the last staff member. This gave people time to find other communities, and to let go.

Yes, but did people need more than THREE YEARS to relocate? When I first started gathering the Abuzz E Mail list, it was in the spring of 2001, when the announcement of the layoffs was made. That announcement was the beginning of the end.

I think that 3-6 months from announcement to closing would have been a great kindness, and would have spared members the agony of watching Abuzz deteriorate.

When it kept going on and on, I always had in the back of my mind that NYT wanted to keep Abuzz viable, possibly because they wanted to do something with it eventually.

I received to Abuzz updates today (9/6) dated 9/2. Abuzz dies hard.

Wow!!!!!

That is amazing.

Well, prolly to the techies ir is not - but to me it is.