AOL Layoffs

Interesting times. So, as you may have read in the press,
AOL laid off a lot of people on the west coast in late
December. It was pretty traumatic. Nevertheless, we've
managed to pull through and now have reached a point where
things are now moving again.

The San Francisco office is closing down tomorrow. It's
really funny to me that with all the conflict we had with
Spinner when we first moved in, we're the ones who get to
shut off the lights at their own office. Pretty much no
one from the original Spinner is left, I guess that's life
in this business.

Also, if you were paying attention, you've now realized
that Justin no longer works here. He ended up resigning
after an interview with him came out in Rolling Stone
late January came out. Ultimately, I'm happy for him. He
needed to get away. Ultimately he wasn't happy here and
this is the best thing that could possibly have happened.

In other news, Rob's company - Mediacode, was bought by
Yahoo and he's now working there with Ian on their next
big thing. Good for them, I'm happy to see that they're
making loads of progress and having a good time.

As for me, I just got a promotion. I've been working on
Winamp and AOL Media Player for some time now and I got
recognized for my contributions. It's a good feeling.
Plus I like money, so it worked out.

What about Winamp you ask? Well Winamp is continuing to
move forward. Winamp 5.03 is coming out on Tuesday. We've
got an implementation of Windows Media Audio that doesn't
suck anymore. 5.04 will have a good implementation of WMV
as well, so you'll get to use Winamp to listen and watch
all those music and video downloads you rent/buy from
the various services out there. We're also going to finally
do the Media Info Editor some justice and make it not suck
anymore too.

Also, on Tuesday, we're going to launch a fairly big
updated to Winamp.com. Taber and Wen have been kicking the
site's ass and it's finally starting to come together.

Basically, it's all good times.

Peace.

-s