Amagama to close shop

I received the following communication from the Amagama team today.

Dear Amagama user

After much consideration and consultation, we have decided to close Amagama. The platform has very few active users, and we do not believe that it would be worthwhile trying to save it from its technical problems.

Amagama’s biggest challenge was spam blogs. These spam blogs - or “splogs” - created thousands of accounts and put too much pressure on the system to keep it running efficiently. (And sometimes impossible to keep it running at all.) As a result, Amagama suffered from poor performance over its lifespan, which made it unattractive to users.

However, we don’t want to leave our legitimate bloggers high and dry. If you still have an active blog on Amagama, we suggest you move it to another platform. If you need assistance moving the blog, please contact us and we will help you.

We will also forward any users from your Amagama account to your new platform. If you wish to do this please let us know.

On a personal note, I am truly sorry that we have had to take this difficult decision. Amagama has a long history in the South African blogisphere, and this closure marks the end of that history.

Other platforms that you should consider are www.blogger.com (international), www.wordpress.com (international) and blogs.24.com (local).

We will close Amagama on Wednesday, 20 May 2009.

Kind regards
Jason Norwood-Young
Technical Manager
M&G Online
jasonn@mg.co.za

It would be interesting to know if this is due to what could be perceived as a slow purge of the online M&G interests or, as the communication states, a combination of low usage and spam blogs.

M&G were for a long time (in web terms) the leaders in the South African web 2.0 space but of late there properties have been under fire for there lack of direction since key players left the team, Amatomu being a case in point.