The Gay Hulu?

Many thanks to "Anon4" for his comment about new info on the gay.com merger with here! During yesterday's conference call with stockholders they presented where the new executives want to take the company in the future. You can see the "slides" used during the call which include some mockups of what the new new gay.com may look like by clicking here. The plan seems to tap synergies between their social networking sites and their programming from here! I'm still not sure how their print publications fit into it all, except maybe for source material for online services and guaranteed print advertising for online services. Gay.com seems to be an established online audience for the programming they're already selling via "subscription video-on-demand" through most cable providers.

Hopefully the Here Media revamp of the site will learn from the mistakes made by the PlaneOut management. The fact that Hulu is already out there with a working business plan and growing audience (including fun programming like "Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog") helps ease my fears.

A positive indication is that the new executives are getting a $1.00 salary for the first year (although we don't know at the moment what salary they've been guaranteed for future years). And I'm not sure what they will really be able to accomplish within that first year. These things take time.

One thing I don't comprehend is how they can offer current PlanetOut shareholders this "Special Stock in Here Media [the new merged company] which provides certain limited downside protection of $4.00 per share value." My knowledge of this sort of thing is pretty limited, but this sounds like they're going to guarantee that this special stock will never be less than $4.00 per share, which seems strange for a stock that's lately been under 40 cents a share. Also the current PlanetOut shareholders will own 20% of the new company, while current here! owners will get 80%. It takes a lot more math to wrap your head around all of this than my poor little brain can handle at the moment. I'm trying to figure out how many common shares (or fractions of a share) of the new company I would get for each share I currently own in PlanetOut. How many shares of the "special stock?"

Makes my poor little head hurt.

And, sadly, until Here Media can fix gay.com we're stuck with a site that requires enormous amounts of "scheduled maintenance" when it isn't having an "unplanned outage." Maybe, maybe PLEASE, they'll release an API that lets 3rd-party programmers develop their own chat programs that work with gay.com, even if they do so on a simpler level specifically designed to ease the load on their servers.

Something about 10:30 p.m.?

The system went down tonight just before 10:30 p.m. and others have commented that it seems like it has gone down at that same time several nights. There's a joke that when a site goes down at night "it must be lunch time in India" but 10:30 here is 10:00 a.m. there. Maybe they go to lunch early?

Putting my money ...

... where my mouth is. Today I became a shareholder in PlanetOut, Inc. (LGBT). It took forever for e-trade.com to get my newly open account going (I opened it two weeks ago and they sat on my money until yesterday before they'd let me invest it ... nice racket!). I bought 200 shares at 42 cents each, which proptly dropped to 32 cents then closed at 39 cents. I'm already well on my way to losing money. But I figured it's worth it just for the laughs while I can still buy stock on the open market.

Better late than never

Thanks to an anonymous reader of this blog for letting me know that they've canned the CTO, Bill Bain, the guy most responsible for the disasterous upgrade.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1287258/000095013409000555/f51106e8vk.htm

Sadly they're also laying off about 33% of their total workforce. No specifics in the SEC filing, but I fear that the bulk will be in their IT support, which needs all the help it can get just to keep the site running.

Two nights in a row

Down again tonight?

gay.com is currently experiencing technical difficulties. We are
aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as we can. Please bear
with us, we will be back online soon.

When will they realize that this "upgrade" has been one huge mistake?

More weirdness

Online chatting right now I tried to open a "mini bio" from the user list and got this:

Planned System Maintenance
gay.com and Planetout.com are
currently down. This is a planned outage for system upgrades and we should
be
back online by 7:00am Pacific Time.
In the meantime, please visit our
sister
sites:
Gay Sports Blog — www.gaysportsblog.com
Gay TV Blog — www.gaytvblog.com
Gay Music Blog — music.gay.com
Hot Topics — hottopics.gay.com
Gay Travel Blog — travel.gay.com
For news on the gay.com site, check out gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog
Thank you for your
patience.
Eric WilsonVP, Product Planning and Strategy

Although just going to http://gay.com/ you get:

System Outage
gay.com is currently experiencing technical
difficulties. We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as
we can. Please bear with us, we will be back online soon.
In the meantime,
please visit our sister sites:
planetout.com — www.planetout.com
Gay Sports Blog — www.gaysportsblog.com
Gay TV Blog — www.gaytvblog.com
Gay Music Blog — music.gay.com
Hot Topics — hottopics.gay.com
Gay Travel Blog — travel.gay.com
For news on the gay.com site,
check out gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog
Thank you for your
patience.
Eric WilsonVP, Product Planning and Strategy

without the BS about it being a "planned" outage. So, where is the product "Planning and Strategy" in all of this???? Oddly enough chat continued to work for a few minutes after those errors.

These people can't be fired too soon.

How much planned maintenance can one website need?

Yeah, I just went to log on and saw this:

Planned Outage
We will be taking gay.com down on January 10, 2009 from 4:00
am to 7:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Good grief! Is there any website out there that needs this much "planned maintenance" that takes down the entire site for so long?

Fire Sale!

Thanks to those of you who let me know about PlanetOut being "merged." I'd wondered why the stock had started to sneack back up the past few days (so much for me being able to buy a piece of the company at bargain basement prices). Although at the close today the stock was down consdierably from yesterday's close.

It is interesting that this is being considered a "merger" with the company that recently bought PlanetOut's publishing interests. Also interesting is talk "suggesting that plans are already afoot to offload the company for a low price within the next four years."

http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=4&article=46905

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/PlanetOut-Here-Networks-and-prnews-14011236.html

Let's hope that the new management is smart enough to dump Bill Bain (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govBio&ID=167554), the PlaneOut CTO who has so thoroughly botched the "upgrade" and Eric Wilson (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govBio&ID=153438) who has been the guy feeding us all the bullshit about the upgrade.

And yet again

So:

Planned Outage
We will be taking gay.com down on January 8, 2009 from 2:00 am
to 9:30 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Didn't we just have this?

Another Planned Outage

Here we go again:

Planned Outage We will be taking gay.com down on January
6, 2009 from 5:00 am to 9:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Seriously, the site was never down this much for "maintenance" before.

"News"

gay.com's standards for news are sinking as low as their stock price. Today one of their "top stories" promoted on their home page is about underwear fashion very conveniently also promoting one of their few advertisers, FreshPair.com.

http://style.gay.com/2008/12/new-years-resol.html

Ya know, it wouldn't be quite as bad if they'd done the fashion bit and then included a small mention that "these styles are available at ..." but they put the vendor name in the promo on the main page. I wonder when we'll start getting the same treatment for travel articles including Expedia by name?