From ENWorld:

Wizards of the Coast today announced the decision to discontinue its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on digital initiatives for core brands Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.

According to the official website and Randy Buehler's blog, Gleemax is due to be shut down sometime in September. Gleemax is WotC's attempt at a one-stop gaming social networking and blogging site.

So what the heck is Gleemax? The best way I can describe it is web technology from the 90's in 2008. I guess it was meant to provide a "community". But there are already tons of communities surrounding D&D. How on earth could Wizards steal people away from those communities with technology that is just as old and rickity? Where was the incentive?

They would have done better to provide an amazing Web 2.0 type service to aggregate the world of communities out there. Kinda of like digg.com or the like. Wizards needs some serious Silicon Valley mojo. They should hire some Web 2.0 guys like Kevin Rose. If they could combine that in with all the other amazing Web 2.0 world and rollout D&DI stuff that will actually work, maybe they can start developing a community. But message boards does not a community make. "If we build it. They will come" doesn't work anymore when anyone can setup a dusty old message board. 

Case in point. While I enjoy much of the content on ENWorld, I absolutely hate hate hate their web site. I feel like I'm stuck on some horrid free Ultima Online message board from 1998. And where the hell are the RSS feeds? Paying for search? Seriously? Like anyone can't just put "site:enworld.org" in their google search. Sigh. But there is already an established community there that has provided amazing 4e news. In spite of all the things that drive me nuts about it... I still like it and I still get a lot of my D&D news from it. It is still enormously valuable. Wizards can't compete with that from scratch, but what if they could let us post links, recommend them, rank them, follow other's recommendations, search them, categorize them, etc... e.g. "The Symantic Web". Now that would be useful.

There is a large and varied eco-system of sites and information out there. Wizards should be looking to leverage all of it and let the users decide what's useful, stupid, good, bad, and indifferent. So get on it! But only after you actually make useful D&D applications. If you fail at that... again... no one will care what you have on your website. I certainly won't.