I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time to move alot of their older-branded goods to newer-branded bags, but apparently it wasn’t winning any more eyes for the banner ads.

AIM Groups was announced in November 2007 as a rebranding of AOL Groups, an e-groups service set up a few years ago to compete with Yahoo, MSN and Google Groups, it was part of AOL’s Microsoft-like blitz to rebrand everything under a better-known brand name, which also included AIM Profiles for those who wanted to use the famous instant messenger for surfing “personals”.

Then in June 2008, AIM Groups was announced as a pack of dead weight to be dropped off by July 10. As usual, the users who used AOL Groups as an alternative to the other, older services cried to the AIM Groups employees on the “People Connection” employee blog posting (which had also played party to two posting by employees in the AIM Groups department who were on their way out of the company) to spin it off or otherwise save the venture, but to no apparent or obvious avail.

Yep, yet another AOL failure. A tremendous failure.

Surprise: there wasn’t even a Wikipedia article on AOL or AIM Groups during the short existence of either entity at the time of the announcement.