KIVAS KREW

Important Announcement

The MSN Groups service will close in February 2009. You can move your group to Multiply, MSN’s partner for online groups. Learn More

This is from the Community Feedback message group. Looks like we'll be taken over by another company and probably will be able to stay together. I copied the post from the Community Feedback message board:

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In addition to the official statement from a Microsoft representative who joined CF to confirm (please see our What's New page for her statement), MSN Groups Contact is also giving confirmation to the impending closure of MSN groups. The SRX ID numbers vary, but if you contact MSN Groups support via the Feedback link at the bottom of any groups page, you will get a response like the following:

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Thank you for writing to MSN Groups Technical Support. My name is Nadia and I understand that you want to know if it is true that MSN Groups are closing down and moving to Multiply. I realize the importance of addressing this matter.

Kari, it is true that we are planning to close the MSN Groups service on February 21, 2009 and will offer you the opportunity to move your group to our new partner service, Multiply. We want you to be able to keep your group together, so we partnered with Multiply to create a migration process that moves your group to their service to preserve your online community and its history.

The migration method that Multiply has built for you will be ready next week. Once the service is ready we will send all of our users an email and will post notices within the MSN Groups site with more information, including instructions for beginning the migration process. In the meantime you can visit http://Multiply.com to get to know the service and see some of the thousands of groups they host already.

Many users are asking why we are closing MSN Groups. We want to provide our customers with the most current and user-friendly technology available today and we made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service as part of our overall investment in updating and re-aligning our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. It is very important to us that you still have access to your group and its data and that is why we have partnered with Multiply, so you can keep your group going into the future despite the closure of MSN Groups.

Between today and February 21, 2009 nothing will change about the MSN Groups service except that we will remove the option to add more storage to your group. Other features will remain until the service is shut down and you can use it the same way you do today until the date of closure. Watch the site and your email inbox over the next week as we will post updated information there, including a more detailed outline of your options and next steps.

We appreciate your continued support as we strive to provide you with the highest quality service available. Thank you for using MSN Groups.

Sincerely,
Nadia
MSN Groups Technical Support

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We realize this isn't something we want, but efforts now should be geared towards backing up your present group's content and exploring other options. Since Windows Live groups have not launched yet and the beta is being guarded like Fort Knox, we don't have much to tell you other than the peek we got last year seems to indicate it's more of a blog-type social networking effort that will be integrated into Live Spaces.

We encourage you to go to multiply.com and take the tour. See what the site has to offer. If you have questions, contact them directly for answers. In the meantime, we're compiling a list of alternatives (please see this: MSN Groups alternatives request) and would appreciate your input, via email (not on the boards, please) towards that end. When we have a list composed, we will post it for our members, so you can check out what is available out there.

We will also be starting another thread allowing our members to speak to MSN/Microsoft about what groups mean to them and how the closure will impact them. It may not make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but may give the powers that be pause for thought. We ask that you please refrain from bashing Microsoft/MSN or using "salty" language to make your points (if you do, your posts will be removed) and instead, have your say with dignity and intelligence, which will make much more of an impression that an obscenity laced diatribe.

Finally, we'd like to thank our members for their loyalty over the years. Managing a group this size is not an easy task and requires a huge committment of time and energy. For the past several months, we're proud to say this has become much easier and all of this is due to our terrific membership. We hope that everyone will be joining us at our home on the web, www.cfontheweb.com.

Thanks Kathy. I feel so lame about all this. You would never know that I spend my life working with computers.

It took me so long to figure out how to apply the style because when you click "apply" that's not the end of it. They want you to fill out another screen. Sheesh ... could they make this stuff any more obnoxious?

I forgot that I had already created a group called KivasKrew, so now I'm a member of Diane, DianeZee, KivasKrew and Krew, LOL. Except that DianeZee is not a community. When I opened my DianeZee account, I didn't create it as a community, just as an individual account. I guess if we do stay on yuku, we can use KREW (your community) as our main place since there really is no Kiva anymore. I mean, she doesn't come here anymore. And if we use yuku, I think everyone has to first open an individual account?? Is that how it works?

Anyway, here's KivasKrew ... I like this fall flowers motif.

Kathy -- Cool. I like it! There really is slim-pickin's when it comes to nice "skins." I think they're appealing mostly to young folk who like weird backgrounds. But I like the ones you chose.

Another forum community that I keep hearing about (that I haven't had time to check out) is aimoo.com. I also have some time off around Christmas -- about 6 days -- so that's a good time to play around.

And I also encourage everyone on the Krew to open accounts at these places and just play around. I'm sure something will eventually stick and we'll just sort of organically find ourselves liking one place over another.

The yuku krew site skin is very pretty.

Okay, since we're slow at work today, I've been playing around with www.aimoo.com -- this is another group that is very popular with the MSN set. So far the two communities that seem to be most popular are yuku and aimoo. They look similar too. However, aimoo has an advantage in that they will migrate MSN groups, which is a big plus because then we won't lose a lot of our old posts and maybe the migration will even mimic our setup, with our "rooms" and such. Not sure how that all works.

As with most of these online communities, there is a learning curve on how to set it up and how to do this and how to do that. Just playing around a bit, I've created a DianeZee Test Page (I didn't want to use the Krew name just yet in case we decide to use aimoo and let them migrate the whole group over there). It's quite similar to yuku and I think I'm actually liking it a bit better. It does all the same things ... and you can upload your graphics to Photobucket and aimoo has a direct link to Photobucket so you can insert graphics.

I'll give you the link and hopefully you'll be able to look around ... but you might have to sign up first -- using your own name of course.

I left a message on aimoo.

It is circulating in my Yahoo groups that if you belong to Grouply or Multiply, you must unsubscribe from them or Yahoo because both are big spammers.

So I guess we need to consider something besides Multiply.

I'm signed up at Multiply -- one of my groups has been experimenting with moving over there and I'm not sure if they will or not -- but I haven't noticed any additional spamming in my mailbox. I never heard of Grouply, so that's not an issue. I'm finding that MSN groups are either moving to yuku or aimoo but I'm still holding out for something even better, if it exists.

Diane - any news as to what we are going to do??

I thought about setting us up at Yahoo Groups. I really do like it. I belong to several tag, graphic and incredimail groups. Messages are posted on the board but also sent out to everyone in an email. There are also folders that birthdays and other stuff can be kept. You don't have to have incredimail to use it. Just a good email site. That's one of the reasons I have gmail.

What do you think??? You would love all the psp and graphic groups.

Rhonda -- I've personally never been very comfortable using Yahoo Groups and for our purposes, Yuku.com and Aimoo.com may be a better choice because they have a similar "forum" style, with the "rooms" on the left side and the messages inside those rooms. Most MSN groups are moving to either yuku or aimoo.

We can always do a trial run on Yahoo. If you want, why not set up a group at Yahoo and then we can test it out. The reason I also was favoring aimoo.com is because they have a feature where they can migrate this group, which would mean (if I'm understanding it correctly) that we would be able to keep all our old posts and they would set up our group for us. But if you want to do a test-run at Yahoo, go ahead ... we still have about 3 weeks to decide, so we can play around with different forums in those 3 weeks and see which one everybody likes best.

Rhonda -- I was checking out one of my Yahoo groups. I don't usually go into the group itself because I usually only read the daily digest which I receive by email. I don't participate in the groups I belong to; I just read posts, so it's easier for me to receive email digests of the posts. But I was looking at the setup of the Yahoo groups and maybe it can work. I was trying to see how easy (or not) that it would be for us to post graphics and photos. I think they have a place where we can upload them but I'm not sure. It would be great to be able to post sigs and photos without having to first upload them to Photobucket. I'm also wondering if we can have sections, e.g., General, Reality Shows, American Idol Chat, Ask The Tech Guy, Just For Fun, Tags, etc. -- you know what I mean? That's the part of MSN that I always liked ... it was like different rooms to run around and do different stuff.

So if you feel ambitious, set up a group called The Krew and let's take a test run.

Do you want me to set it up as Kiva's Krew or just The Krew???

I think at this point we should call ourselves The Krew. I don't think Kiva is coming back so I think we are who we are now because of who we are now. haha. Even when I was playing around with setting up groups, I always called us The Krew. To me, that's who we are.

Important Announcement The MSN Groups service will close in February 2009. You can move your group to Multiply, MSN’s partner for online groups. Learn More
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