No, it was bought by MRG after AOL fought its users and won, so they all left for Skype.
EDIT: Or maybe first by Rambler and then by MRG. Rambler was the Russian search engine I used in 2005, btw. Was an email provider too. I had an email account or two there, don’t even remember which. Also narod dot ru (free web hosting, similar to geocities) hasn’t yet been bought by Yandex then, and there were ucoz dot ru sites, and borda dot ru free web forums (something like phpbb). ICQ (and later Skype) would be used for real-time conversations in all of these communities. EDIT2: … which you’d make forums for.
It didn’t just die, it straight up was acquired by the Russians (presumably to suppress the public) and then gutted. Uh oh indeed.
We are truly living the Days of Internet Services Past.
No, it was bought by MRG after AOL fought its users and won, so they all left for Skype.
EDIT: Or maybe first by Rambler and then by MRG. Rambler was the Russian search engine I used in 2005, btw. Was an email provider too. I had an email account or two there, don’t even remember which. Also narod dot ru (free web hosting, similar to geocities) hasn’t yet been bought by Yandex then, and there were ucoz dot ru sites, and borda dot ru free web forums (something like phpbb). ICQ (and later Skype) would be used for real-time conversations in all of these communities. EDIT2: … which you’d make forums for.