Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur?

Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite years of layoffs and tumbling net worth, AOL seemed to get a new lease on life this week when Verizon bought it for $4.4 billion. But even if AOL's still alive, using an AOL email address has long been seen as a way of signaling that you're stuck in the 1990s. A recent analysis of Dice data found that a mere 1.8 percent of those registering for the site used an AOL address, versus 55 percent for Gmail. For the past several years, Websites from Gizmodo to Lifehacker have all declared that still using an AOL email address is counterproductive, to put it mildly. But is that actually true? Do the people in your life and work actually care whether you use AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, or a custom address, or is the idea of 'email bias' an overblown myth?

Comments

personally

[koan]

In the instance of AOL, I am surprised it still exist, and then I begin to picture a little old lady that doesn't know any better than to use it.
When it comes to Hotmail or Yahoo, it's so cluttered I can't see why anyone would bother with it.

That brings us to Gmail, I like clean lines, simplicity, what I don't like is UI churn, so that just as soon as I get it in my head where to go to get something done... it moves somewhere else.

Like some never ending game of "Where's Waldo".

Re:personally

[tnk1]

AOL still reaches people who can't get broadband and need to use modems. Poor sods.

The thing is, unlike with broadband, where AOL was just some walled garden app and some content sites, with modems, they're actually a real ISP. And they're really the only national modem based ISP still in existence worth talking about.

You don't have to be a little old lady to be using AOL. You just have to live far enough off the broadband network to need to use modems still.

And as someone who worked at AOL itself not so long ago, no one was more shocked than I was when the execs announced that they'd come to the realization that while dialup was declining, it wasn't actually doing so in a precipitous fashion any more. When you take away the loss of all of the broadband adopters, AOL still had a substantial business in dialup, and their dialup infrastructure was paid off and/or low maintenance. AOL, due to its size, is the last man standing from the dialup age.

Dialup will eventually end, but it could take decades to finally drive a nail in that coffin.

Re:Dinosaur? Hipster?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've only had three email addresses since 1994. And two of them still work. If you write me at any email address I've had for the last 19 years, it will still get to me.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I value consistency and reliability over the latest fad any day. I'd much rather hire a guy who still uses his old aol email address than some kid who changes his email address (along with his mailing address) every year because he's unreliable and unstable.

Even AOL employees shunned it

[erikscott]

AOL employees used to have aol.com addresses. No one took them seriously, figured they were crackpots/frauds/walkoffs. So AOL started giving employees a corp.aol.com address circa 1997. Then folks would start replying to their emails.

I worked at a .com startup and this happened to us - got some interest from some loser with an aol.com address. Ran into him again at a trade show, and he explained he actually worked for AOL. And we didn't get the sale. Go figure. Did have a corp.aol.com address by then, though.

Re:Even AOL employees shunned it

[nite-]

As a former AOL employee - this is false. The corp.aol.com bit came around after 2006 - when company email moved off of aol.com and onto an internal Exchange installation. Those of us on the tech side of the business did often use @aol.net with internally operated smtp servers, however. In fact, it was very difficult internally to *not* use your "Business Screen Name" for official use internally - and that continued until after I quit in 2006.

Re:What does it say about you?

[LateArthurDent]

Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.

I consider judging people based on irrelevant categories to be far more damning.

Shortly after gmail came out, every other free webmail provider upped their storage amount in order to compete, including aol. Gmail at the time didn't provide imap access. You could access your mail via the web interface or pop. Aol, on the other hand, did provide imap, along with a ton of storage space, which allowed me to check my personal e-mail via my PDA's email client (remember those?), instead of its horrible browser.

I had a perfectly technical reason to switch to an aol address while everybody was switching to gmail.