The folks at AOL are planning to shut down its Video Upload service due to budgetary concerns. Considered by many to be AOL’s answer to the likes of YouTube and DailyMotion, the site featured the standard mix of user-generated content and light copyright fraud. Those behind the doomed site are directing users to video partner Motionbox. Other services receiving the axe from management are online backup system XDrive, social storytelling site BlueString, and AOL Pictures. The closing has absolutely no effect of AOL Video, which is dedicated to so-called “profressional video outlets” such as Hulu. At press time, AOL Video Upload last day will be December 18th.

In browser news, both Firefox 2 and the Gecko 1.8 rendering engine that it is based upon will be sent out to pasture as well. Mozilla officials site the release of Firefox 3 as the primary reason for the move. It should be noted, however, that discontinuing support does not necessarily mean the death of a program. Unlike services such as the AOL Video Upload, which will ultimately disappear after the switch is pulled, users and programmers will still have access to both the browser and the engine. They will just not receive any official security updates from the Mozilla team. The last hurrah for Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 will be sometime in December.

Elsewhere, Google Docs might not be as popular as once thought. According to a poll conducted by Clickstream Technologies, 1% said that they use the online office suite on a regular basis. By comparison, 51% of the 2400 users surveyed said that Microsoft Office was their software package of choice. These findings mirror the statements of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who recently scoffed at the notion of Google Docs becoming a legitimate threat. “We get more competition from OpenOffice and StarOffice,” Ballmer said in his keynote address at the Gartner, Inc. Conference. “People try Google Apps, [but] they don’t use it. It’s primative… You can’t even put a footnote in a document!”

It seems as if the business of spamming has fallen on some “tough times,” so to speak. According to a report in the Washington Post, spam volume has decreased by 66% since Tuesday. This is largely due to the shutdown of McColo, one of the recognized “leaders” in the spaming industry. It is believed that McColo was at one point responible for three-quarters of all of the junk email sent to users. Sadly, many expect the “industry” to stabilize once the displaced spammers find a new outlet for their special brand of useless nonsense.

Finally, we have Ping.fm. On the surface, the Ping.fm service doesn’t appear to be anything that special. As any fan of the Free Line knows, there are literally dozens of programs and webapps that allow you to modify your favorite social service accounts without actually visiting the site. What sets Ping.fm apart from the others is the simple fact that it’s not a program at all. The service actually uses an interesting cross-section of popular sites and services to connect to a variety of web 2.0-centric services, from social networking pages to microblogging clients to bloging platforms.Thanks to Ping.FM, telling your “virtual fanbase” what you have been up to has never been easier to do.