just rereading graeme, up, once reported a paedophile for chatting up an underage girl online, reaction from navi (when eventually arrived) was the child was over 13 and therefore not their problem.  lots of things need fixed here.

have just read up, and totally agree with others, especially Jill, to which I would add that the regulars, supported by navi mates, just run the thing, there is no governance.

And in my opinion it is not that easy to post comments, took me several goes and not IT illiterate, I run IT for a govt agency and it is better than this.  IF YOU WANT COMMENTS MAKE IT EASIER. Rant over.  And why do you need the e-mail address, that just intimidates the people most discriminated against in the old system, so there’s a group you will hear little from.

Lol, if you really want to fix it, and it had potential, you not doing it right.  Try listening to users (who had no warning of recent developments, not great customer service)/

lol, I notice that my earlier comment is not yet here, is it subject to censure by Lycos?

Have tried to register for the new service, but am “banned” even though I wasn’t banned under ToS under the old service, so old regulars still running the show it seems. for anyone bothers to read this, don’t go, gets very sad very quickly.

Lol, if Lycos fund you, doubt you will print this.

Well this is so wrong, why did Lycos fail? I liked it a lot.

Has the chat site gone?  The ship etc?
I tried to log in this morning, but all i am getting is a broken link thing. I agree with the comments about some of the users. I first began using lycos chat some 10 years ago, i can remember when they merged Love@lycos with us and what an uproar that caused.
It didn't help when a female chatter named Tigerbear ran off with the co-owner and then proceeded to cull all the navigators who she had previous spats with and basically threw her weight about. A lot of the regular users either left on their own accord or were banned by her for daring to speak up.
I deactivated my own account around 3 yrs ago and have recently rejoined, the changes on the chat site were astounding, absolutely terrible. It seems to be little more than a cyber brothel now, where people, married or not simply go to have cybersex or actually meet up for the real thing…married or not! Within days i deactivated my account again in disgust.
I wont miss it.

thank god you have gone may u never come back ... your site was a joke , u allowed a few freaks to run the chat ... with no id what so ever ,, great day for all .. good bye ,,,

iam glad its gone it allowed any user 2 make a profile up , and did not check if that user was for real , all you had was a load a people unwilling 2 show id and get away with it , get a site that make s you prove you are the user .. easy .. men ben women . women beeen men . and any child been able 2 do the same hang your head in shame lycos ..

I think there should be a future for the chat community.

Its chat rooms were a complete disaster.

One option may have been to reunite the disparate Lycos regions.

It could have been such a succes, but ended so sad

The lycos chat has been moved and will be continuing. 

the chat was never owned by lycos europe but by another company.  to get to the chat you go to uk.worldbiggistchat.com   but you have been able to do it that way for years

I've used Lycos chat via my Yahoo login and agree that it was a bit over the top at times with little restrictions other than from a group of navigators who seem to be unpaid policemen. That said I think there should be a future for the chat community maybe via Yahoo?

Lycos simply didn't adapt. Its chat rooms were a complete disaster. With its captain ships and decks it lured children into a community and exposed them to harmful adult content.

We are finishing a platform which makes available inteoperability of content, chiefly through the provision of a de facto standard for information - as opposed to interoperability of software or whatever. The standard involves c. 70 top-level attributes (= analytical approaches to information definition). This will change the Net from a library with all the books on the floor, or the Tower of Babel, to a navigable medium for knowledge worker communication and information management. It's about 2 generations ahead of Google. For us Lycos Europe would be an ideal vehicle to make the platform available, in Europe and globally. For Lycos, the platform would provide the basis for a new life. But how do we get the attention of Lycos' management? Suggestions?
Don

I used to have email and use Lycos website heavily till about 2002 or something like that… after that I cannot remember how was the transition to google. It is amazing ;-)

Hang on - I manage some domains through Lycos. What'll happen to the web hosting / professional services arm etc? I'm hoping for continuity / minimal disruption. Shame tho.

No way this could be true i am a lycos chat user and have been since the opening bk in 2000/2001 ... i was just 11/12 years old then if the chat was 2 be taken away i dunno wot i would do lol

From another Lycos alum who used to work with Wessel, this analysis is spot on. As early as 2002, it was clear to people on the ground who had a clue (and there were a few, they were just woefully underrepresented in management) that Lycos was fast becoming an irrelevance in search and that it was squandering some major opportunities in mobile and community. The number of great products and teams that were brought only to be staggeringly mishandled was heartbreaking.

Time that should have been spent working on the next generation of products was instead wasted on moronic 'market positioning' initiatives such as the infamous "Nicole 23", in which the entire UK arm of the company spent weeks putting themselves in the position of a fictional target user to better understand what kind of content (yes, content) she would most respond to.

Another +1 for Jurgen Galler, who was one of the few senior management who had a strong product sense and sound strategic grasp of the direction of digital media.

So much value destruction, so many wasted opportunities.

Excellent analysis, guys. Keep it coming, and please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any extra info. Thanks.

There were more problems:

1) killing spray = a cool BRAND with huge traffic

2) buying SEO driven shopping pages from Pangora for 30.000.000 EUR ... 2 weeks after the owners sold them to Lycos GOogle kicked them out of Index = LOSS of 80 % of traffic

3) buying Traffic from Google for Lycos IQ… a service they couldn't monetize

4) investing heavily in Jubii 2.0 a service that never took of

5) running around in high level meetings TALKING about the Future of eCommerce etc. instead of working on those solutions
http://www.e-commerce-kongress.de/kongress.php

I agree with moth of Van Rensburgs analyzis. In my opinion, the biggest problem Lycos did, was to centralize development of the many succes-products they bought.

Lycos has HQ in Gütersloh, Germany - and it turned out that it was very hard to get the most innovative people to move there and continue working with their "babys".
Furthermore they drowned the remaining innovation in German style burocracy.

The only cool product they released the last couple of years were IQ - as Van Rensburg mention - but not even that, they managed to capitalize. A service allmost commercialfree is hard to make money from :-)

It could have been such a succes, but ended so sad

There was a time that Lycos Europe had the largest self publishing platform (Tripod), a precursor to today's blogs. The largest youth community (Love@Lycos or Spray date) remarkably similar in features to the early MySpace.

It had and still has the largest European chat rooms in Jubii. It had the largest web email product (Caramail) in many parts of Europe and the biggest mobile channel.

But top management (heavy in MBA's), all of whom (with the exception of Jurgen Galler - now at Google) showed little understanding for new media, shunned these market leading products.

The reason?

A consultant told them that they had too many 'Chatters and Gamers', cash poor time rich youngsters and too little 'dotcom dablers' 'time poor cash rich' older people. But a little analytics whould have showed them that these web users do nothing but shop on Amazon - a comparable product Lycos did not have.

The company decided to target the dablers, but its product set was hopelessly inadequate to attarct or satisfy them.

Then they put that cart in front of the horse. Lycos introduced charging for webmail, Love@lycos, mobile, hosting. Dablers like paying. At the same time they under invested in all these world beating services.

Audience numbers dropped precipitously while they never made much money from charging (premium revenues). The Dablers stayed away.

By 2005 when MySpace hit the headlines it was too late for Lycos to turn things around. They launched a blogging service, a poor knockoff of the Opensource Wordpress. They launched LycosIQ, quite an innovative product.

But it's valuable chatter and gamer audience and products had been lost forever.