I have been pondering a bunch of things over the last few days as I have been dealing with the aftermath of the AOL layoffs. There is always a lot of press as the rumors fly and people try to figure out if there are going to be layoffs, but there is never the same interest in the afterwards.

How do we pick up the pieces and keep going? Who will we work with now? What will we be working on? There is a definite mourning process and then a scramble to make sure we all have stuff to do as we are reorganized.

I am particularly sad, because I came to AOL to work on community products. But the community divlet was disbanded and all the teams have been reorged into functional structures. My team is being rearranged and reassigned to work on a lot of new web stuff and other types of applications. Its a great opportunity - my team grew, the amount of projects could be much larger and there is the opportunity to have insight into a lot more areas, but it is still difficult to say goodbye to the type of thing I was most passionate about - community applications. This does not mean that AOL is not doing community. They are committed as ever and the products will continue to move forward, it just means that at this moment, the UI work will be done by a team back east and not by us out here in Mountain View.

My interest in community is not going to go away and I will still post things that I feel are important or worth passing on.