In February 2008, AOL bought out Goowy Media Inc., the owner of YourMinis.com.  This was AOL’s way of competing with Windows Vista Gadgets, Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, etc.  And 8 months later AOL has decided to shut down the YourMinis.com homepage.  

“We’re sorry to inform you that as of October 27, 2008, we will no longer support the yourminis startpage.  You already know that one of the best things about widgets is their ability to give you access to the content and features you value from different locations across the Web,” stated Gary Benitt, Senior Tech Dir at AOL LLC and COO of Goowy Media.  ”Because there are already so many great startpage solutions out there supporting yourminis (like myAOL, iGoogle or Netvibes), we’ve decided to let the startpage experts take care of the startpages, so we could focus on what we do best — building widgets.”

Yourminis.com was just the victim of failed synergy logic.  But now Goowy will just be focusing on creating widgets that can be added on Netvibes, iGoogle, myAOL, etc.  Since Yourmini widgets are built in Flash, it allowed developers to make widgets more visually appealing.  

Given AOL’s strength in the instant messaging sector, perhaps they can use this to leverage people to add Yourmini widgets to their startpages.

AOL announced that it is acquiring Goowy Media Inc., a widget creation company. Goowy Media owns Yourminis.com, a well known widget website. Yourminis provides widgets for blogs, websites, and desktops.

AOL primarily bought Goowy Media to expand its advertising network. Groovy Media’s widget analytical technology will be a useful addition to AOL’s ad platform.

Widgets are bubbling up all over the web. Every social network from Facebook to MySpace to Bebo has millions of users going crazy over widgets. Slide’s recent $550 million valuation says a lot about the widget market. We will definitely see thousands of widget-focused startups come out in 2008. Who knows – even Pulse2 may get into the widget business.