ANN closes (Amiga Network News)

[Paul]

Christian Kemp at ANN.lu has decided to close down the Amiga Network News site. Here is a copy and paste of what he posted

"Christian Kemp writes: Ten years ago today, the first visitors arrived on what would later be known as "Amiga Network News", and then later still as "ANN.lu".

The first visitors came from a link on the Amiga Web Directory, run by Kevin Hisel and now long defunct, but as more and more people joined the internet with their Amigas word of mouth and prominent mentions on other websites brought in more and more people.

At its peak, several years ago, ANN welcomed over 3000 visitors a day, but this number gradually declined as more and more people left the Amiga scene, for reasons including but not limited to the lack of new hardware, software, the uncertainty associated with frequent ownership changes of the Amiga brand (Escom, Gateway, Amiga Inc, KMOS, etc.), and the lack of professionalism and integrity exhibited by several of the companies still in the market.

Since 1996, a lot of things have changed. Most importantly, my link to the Amiga market has changed - I completely switched over to the x86 platform six years ago already, and my interest in all things Amiga declined ever since. By 2006, that interest had vanished completely, and judging by the visitor figures on ANN I'm not the only one who feels that way. Furthermore, I'm no longer the student with copious free time that I was in 1996, and my free time has gone down to almost zero. As a consequence, I haven't been able to invest as much time into ANN as would have been required.

So I feel that it's been long enough - it's time to close ANN.

Many thanks to everyone who supported ANN and me in the past - there's too many people to mention, too many people that I met online and/or in real life and who helped in one way or another; and I'm grateful for all the good experiences with ANN, and the lessons I learned during the bad times.

In the future, I will concentrate even more on photography and less on computers. ANN won't go away completely though - I will try to keep it online as long as possible, except that it will serve as an archive only, and no new content will be added anymore. The ability to comment has been shut down already, but I will keep the email address going for a few more days."

Source: http://ann.lu/

[Ultron]

Hearing ANN.lu closed is as sad as hearing the local sanitarium had to close by lack of inmates.

Sorry 'bout the brutal honesty and all