Okay, not so shocked

Once again a poorly planned "upgrade" has gay.com down during prime time (at least for the U.S.). Yeah, the work that was supposed to be done in 8 hours is now over 16 hours. While they announced this upgrade in advance on gay.com they didn't bother to make any mention of it in their blog until the site had already been down at least 5 hours longer than anticipated.

Site Update - April 7

We are in the midst of a major system upgrade that will improve performance on gay.com. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the maneuver, it’s taking a little longer than we expected.

Thanks for checking in and please bear with us as we work to get gay.com up and humming for you again soon.

Posted by Jason Herrick on April 7, 2009

I'm wondering if the Regent/here! management will have the balls to admit the failures that the old PlanetOut management refused to acknowledge?

Shock!

This is the first time I've seen one of these in a long time.

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on April 7, 2009 between 2:00 AM to 10:00 AM PST for scheduled maintenance.

Of course I haven't been online as much as I used to.

Long time!

It's been more than 6 weeks since I've noticed an outage worth blogging about ... although the past two days I've had a helluva time staying connected to the group chats. Sometimes it's my computer/browser that acts up. Several times it's that I've been logged out due to "inactivity" despite the fact that I'm one of the most chatty guys in the room.

It's also been more than 6 weeks since I've heard much of anything about the Regent takeover of PlanetOut. PO's CEO resigned. They have NO executive officers listed on their corporate web site (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govmanage).

There's a really interesting article online about how gay print media is "going bust." http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=3516&MediaType=1&Category=28 The glossy mag Genre just closed up shop. Apparently there's been some "corporate raider" behavior of regional gay publications being bought up, stripped and dumped.

Then there's some interesting information about how one holding group now owns more than 25% of PlanetOut, recently buying more half of their stake at 6 cents a share.

They've been notified (again) by NASDAQ that they don't meet minimum listing requirements (http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/16/daily1.html).

I'm just wondering when (or if) the merger/purchase will be completed.

Nothing special ... just for the record

Saw this posted. Just trying to keep a log of up & down.

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on February 10, 2009 from 3:00 am to 8:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

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.