by Calvin Robinson on September 24, 2008.

A couple of years ago, near the begining of the web2.0 phenomenon, a company by the name of Goowy, released a Widget system by the same name, in an attempt to revolutionise the way we use the internet.

It might be said that their ambitions were too high, but never-the-less that didn’t stop them trying.

They built a decent Flash website, with lots of widgets for all the useful stuff; IM, E-mail, Contacts, Calendar, Files, Games and even an MP3 Player.

They formed partnerships with companies like Box.net, for the file sharing. Again, great ideas – it was just their implementation that let them down.

I tried their email service for a while, but the slowness of Flash just didn’t work. Huge letdown. The look-and-feel were fine, but the interface was never going to be usable, being 100% Flash based.

They even tried downloadable desktop widgets too, which later turned into a project of it’s own ‘Your Minis‘.

Turns out AOL took an interest in the project, and bought them out. They are merging all the e-mail addresses into AOL’s system, and allowing users to keep their existing @goowy.com emails, and use the rest of AOL’s services, including AIM.

The confusing part is this, the ‘USP’ of Goowy.com is that it’s a web2.0 Flash-y widget system. An online operating system, if you will. To buy a company like this, strip away all the Flash and widgets and then merge the e-mails into existing systems, is surely erasing the whole idea of Goowy?
I understand that as an e-mail provider, Goowy were offering some competition to AOL, but not enough to raise any eyebrows. So I don’t imagine AOL bought Goowy to whipe out the competition. So I’m obviously missing something here.

Maybe AOL have some better long-term plans for Goowy. Maybe they’re planning some major upgrades to their AOL Mail interface? Or maybe they’re bringing widgets into it somehow. I suppose we’ll see what happens next.