Earlier today we published a list of 50+ projects that AOL has killed or is planning to kill. Some of those items had already been made public, but as far as we can tell, much of it hadn't been discussed outside of AOL. Definitely not discussed outside of AOL: Anything to do with Magnify.net, which showed up on the closed-or-about-to-be list.
Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum contacted us immediately to assure us that his company wasn't dead or about to be, which makes sense to us: As best we could figure, the fact that the company's name showed up on AOL's hit list meant that AOL was cutting off support for its product in some way. But Steve says that's not the case, either. We've asked AOL for clarification, but haven't heard back. In the meantime, here's Steve's statement:
You can imagine our surprise - since AOL doesn't own us, or even have a stake, or - as best as we can tell - support us as a 3rd party app.
So, they can't really shut us down. In fact, we're having a pretty great year, with 35,000 sites now using our service to search and embed videos. We've just landed new financing, and we've got cashflow break even pegged for 2009.
So, the reports of our demise are wildly premature. Now we know how Steve Jobs felt last week.
ps. Our best guess is that AOL had at some point a project called 'magnify' someone got confused and added the .net on the end - but it's not us.
UPDATE: More info, via a comment left by someone who appears to be reasonably informed reader on our original post:
Some background on Magnify.net's inclusion here. Last year AOL budgeted development cycles to do some custom AOL Video API development to enable the distribution of videos on Magnify.net’s platform. During the development process, a decision was made to use AOL's Truveo Video Search APIs, which provide a comprehensive index of all web video. Based on this decision, a decision was made to curtail investment in custom API development.
See Also: AOL's Hit List: 50+ Projects Gone Or Going
