MingleNow is a social network built around the night life of major metropolitan cities. You can find events, view photos, etc. They usually have their photographers at the events snapping photos of the crowd and singling out the hottest chicks. You know, the usual. The difference was that their events were usually quality events. When I wanted to find something to do I would always check MingleNow to see what was going on that night. I always found something fun to do whether I was here in LA or in San Diego or Vegas...
Well, according to this post on the MingleNow blog they are shutting the service as of Jan. 7th, 2008. Yahoo recently purchased a company called Blue Lithium, which happened to own MingleNow. In the MingleNow post they sort of push you to use other services in place of MingleNow; All them owned by Yahoo.
Now I am all for business. I assume that Yahoo has a good reason to shut down MingleNow (again, assuming that this was Yahoo's decision). But the alternatives offered are not up to par with MingleNow.
For one, MingleNow has everything I was looking for in one place. Now they are suggesting I use Flickr, Upcoming and 123out.com; Are you kidding me?
I am willing to bet that most MingleNow users will not head over to those services for their nightlife adventures. Another service will pop up and take MingleNow's place at some point. Maybe sites like ClubPlanet will eat up it's user base.
It's also a good guess that maybe MingleNow just wasn't turning a profit. It's very possible that all their ideas didn't pan out and the "gods" decided it was time to pull the plug.
I don't know. I just felt like ranting about this. So long MingleNow, I'll miss ya.