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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?
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...
K Man
My dentist uses an AOL email address and a website that probably hasn't been updated in a decade. I don't care: He's still a decent enough dentist for the occasional drill-and-fill.
Dentists: Another reason why birds are superior.
I use it (still), but as an email flophouse.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've done a lot of side work for folks needing computer repair and every...single...one of them that had an AOL email were elderly and not technologically savvy. Personally, I don't care if they have an AOL address or not, but professional businesses not having the @mybusiness.com type of domain and having AOL - I personally find it a little harder to take them seriously and, for the most part, they didn't seem to have as much genuine care for the quality of their work. This should be seen as pure conjecture because I'm sure there are those that don't fit this mold. Just talking about personal experience.
We here at dice plan to mine your data but it's an awful hassle to analyze said data. Please do that for us.
Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.
It used to be worse. Now you are just a dinosaur. Before you were king of the chumps.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Long time AOLers have been promoted to 'tech dinosaur' from 'king of the chumps'.
AOL always sucked, There were always better alternatives. Always.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
where you live. I live in Seattle, and despite their government-granted monopoly for most of the city, Comcast typically only offers service in wealthy (read: profitable) areas. In much of the city, faster than dial-up is not available. I had 576 kbps DSL for several years, but it recently quit working so I had to back to dial-up. If you live somewhere with Comcast, then I guess AOL is much more popular in your area.
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".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I had my Yahoo email address from the beginning ("Look, ma, no numbers!"), haven't changed my password since then, and still have recruiters calling me for tech jobs in Silicon Valley. Only stupid people discriminate, especially on the basis of email addresses.
If by "early adopter" you mean "drooling, clueless moron", then yes, your translation is correct.
In my role as a professional phisherman and spammer, I find that using AOL and Yahoo e-mails enhances my target audience responses by 90%.
Besides, it's free and I can create hundreds every hour.
While I'm at it would you be interested in Penis Pills? I have a special on them two bottles for $19.99
Also please click on this link because I have important information about your Social Security benefits.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It means you've had the same email address for 15+ years and don't want to change it.
The only reason I finally got a gmail address was I wanted to be able to keep it through moving, changing ISP providers, changing jobs, etc. Having a consistent email address is a handy thing to have.
Used to indicate that you are a noob idiot with PC's on the internet.
Now it indicates that you are STILL a noob idiot with a PC on the internet with gray hair.
Corporatism != Free Market
From their marketing:
Unlimited storage, 25 MB of photo and video attachments, advanced spam filters, virus protection
I have no idea if that means 25MB per email or total for your mailbox. I'd hope it was the former. They support POP3 or IMAP.
Their current webmail client seems to be somewhat OK (if not cloned outright from Google and then had banner ads slapped in) - screenshot is over 2 years old:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07...
I don't think it means they're leading edge in any way, but they're not lagging behind nearly as much as I thought they were.
It's a chump list. Chump lists are valuable.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The UIs in 1997 were often better than the latest text-free tablet-oriented junk. Not sure about AOL specifically, since I never used it, but everything from Google maps to Windows to Office to video games have had regressions in UI over the past decade.
Run their own email server.
I don't have a gmail address, because Google admits up front they scan the contents of your email for advertising purposes.
No, thank you.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It has a warm, true sound that you just can't get from today's CD's and digital music.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
HA! You dope. I just crafted an AOL address THIS YEAR so I could bypass the other email hosting entities idea that my cellphone number is needed to verify that I'm a human, just so I could create a fake Facebook account so I can play games with my daughter without having to stoop so low as to have a real Facebook account. Mailinator was not an option, this worked out great and now I have an old-school aol.com address. I fucking make websites, I don't consume them. AOL is great if you don't want some free email site hounding you for necessary bullshit info, like your fucking cell phone number.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
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.
So my CompuServe email address shows that I am old?
And AOL service prevents these people from using Google because...? Say what you want, Google usually delivers pretty spare websites. I don't think they'd be much of a problem on dial-up.
That's HoTMaiL for me, it's amazing how much spam is in that thing. It's like getting in a time machine and going back to 2002. Also in reference TFA I have a feeling posts like this are going to motivate people to seek out an aol.com e-mail address ironically. Making anyone the one's thinking 'tech dinosaur' dinosaur's themselves.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
AOL always sucked, There were always better alternatives. Always.
Yes, but back in 1993 its not like you could just Google it. If you were not attacked to some organization with access, and your local public library did not offer shell accounts or something the big name BBS services (with internet gateways) AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were usually the way to go. At least until you could find a local ISP.
Keep in mind most folks were at the time using DOS and Windows. So you also needed to bring some software to the mix, to do PPP etc. That stuff was no on the shelf at your local shop and it was not simple to figure out without online reference materials. The AOL diskette solved both problems.
Once you got online and found an ISP with local access numbers, got the trumpet winsock installed or downloaded Slackware you switched to a real ISP with local dialup numbers. AOL was a first step to something more than a local BBS even for a lot of us techies though, because it as available AND accessible when nothing else way especially if you did not have friends who could help you.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
> I fucking make websites, I don't consume them.
Other than Facebook, and Mailinator, and AOL, and Slashdot, you don't consume them. And this lamp! The ashtray, the paddle game, Facebook, Mailinator, AOL, and Slashdot.. you don't consume any of them at all!
I have an AOL email I still use depending on the need, and use it as a barometer to judge folks I give it to. If someone balks and throws a douche-fit about an email address I really am not interested in dealing with them. It has not caused me to miss out on employment or side work, but the mild concern is there.
It's been my email for about two-dog ages, and I rather not run the issue of changing over everything that goes there.. monitor it for another few months for stragglers.. and then close it.
It's an email address people. I never had the cool Transformer's lunchbox, or nor the best Saved by the Bell TrapperKeeper and I survived.
Same here. Anyone that says, "We need your e-mail address and we promise we won't spam you" gets the AOL account. I check it, maybe, once every few months.
Yes, pretty soon they'll start a cross promotional campaign with Pabst Blue Ribbon. "Free aol.com email address with every sixer purchased, nice skinny jeans by the way!"
If you make websites, then I assume it would be trivial for you to have a custom domain from which you could make unlimited disposable email addresses?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Yes, it can be considerable trouble to change to a new email address.
I have dozens of web accounts, for which I use my yahoo address. It would be a huge PITA to have to change everything. And besides, what would I gain?
You'd think that, but the websites he made were all on GeoCities.
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.
This is so cool, I just went and got myself an aol email account based on this article!
The point is, sometimes you WANT to look like a non-techie. Great deception value.
It means:
you can't make your own blog, let alone own website
you can't master the concept of an email list to forward all your important news to all your friends
you can't find free games on the internet
you basically need to pay a ton of private personal information that you can never get back, just to participate in the internet - a task that technically literate people can easily do without paying that very high price.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
From 71234.56789@compuserve.com:
That reminds me, I must get one of those new v.92 mod^D
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
I think it's awesome that I can still send and receive email with my original @netscape.net email address. Of course, I have to access it via an aol.com server.
Get off my lawn! -- jrumney%slashdot.org%uucp.gateway.bitnet%NET.uu.uunet@uk.ac.earn-relay
That fails on functionality. An AOL email address, AFAIK, functions like any other.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."