The AOL Roller Coaster

eldavojohn writes "There's a lengthy article at Information Week about AOL's history. A lot of us are familiar with AOL's history but few of us realize that it sits at a crossroads today where it could potentially find its way back into consumer's pockets — something it's tried to do before in a hit-or-miss fashion. From the conclusion of the article, one analyst states: 'Ironically, although you'd think AOL should dump its family mentality in light of its competitors like Yahoo, the key to AOL future branding success vs. Yahoo could be to actually capitalize on its family friendliness alongside targeting the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple.' AOL has been met with many problems as of late, but can they pull themselves out of the hole this time?"

Comments

Dear AOL:

[Jason Scott]

...die in a fire. A nasty, painful fire.

The article kind of glosses over that time that AOL released its users onto the Internet at large with absolutely no barriers or training, even an indication they were really not on AOL.

One of my funniest memories of that time was when someone had a webpage up criticizing AOL, and an AOL admin/cop/whatever contacted him and seriously explained that the webmaster was violating AOL's terms of service, and to take the webpage down immediately or have his AOL account terminated.

People looking for examples of how a corporate entity will gang-bang a shared service at the first opportunity need look no further than AOL and its toxic bus-load drop-offs onto the net.

Next time, mention that in a "History".

AOL's Somewhat Rewritten History

[thethibs]

That's funny. "...at the forefront of the Internet revolution".

AOL was the last of the big BBS' to move to the internet, dragged kicking and screaming into ISP-dom by the flight of its subscribers to services that provided internet mail, usenet, ftp and uucp.

About ten thousand of Jack Rickard's army of sysops were offering internet services before AOL's tentative entry. Hardly "a company that was once ahead of its time", AOL nearly didn't make it at all.

Family Friendly?

[jmccay]

I don't know if family friendly is a word I would use with AOL. Every browsed their own chat rooms? You see a lot of user created room names like M4M in various forms. Also, AOL is more a content provider now than just an ISP. Your average ISP is not AOL/Time Warner. They give away their music videos (music.aol.com). I wonder how they will make money with their free service. Lastly, all you needed to do to use the internet without AOL in the days of dial-up was login to AOL, and then minimize it.