I’m one of those anti-AOL people: the ones who are snobby about the vaunted service after having escaped long, long ago.
I had AOL once (screenname GeneC – that should tell you how long ago) – more than 10 years ago when it was a Macintosh-only service, freshly rebranded after a few years as AppleLink Personal Edition. (I had actual, real-live AppleLink as well, which was quite a status symbol, and miss having that gene.cowan address.) Anyway, AOL once had a sense of community and was fun, and then they opened the floodgates to PC users, and the fun was over. The service became an open-air sex market and it became impossible to actually have a chat with someone; the service slowed to a crawl, and I became so tired of waiting for “art” to download. Thank goodness I was introduced to the actual Internet instead of AOL’s psuedo-net.
Since then I was also a beta tester for Apple’s eWorld, a duplicate of AOL for Macs only. It flopped, unfortunately.
It seems that AOL is the Internet for stupid people, for the most part. I qualify that because I know one or two people who use AOL and are pretty damned intelligent – but I can’t figure out why they would use that service.
And here’s a worrying new bit of news: AOL is about to offer blogs.
Up until now, a blog has required a certain about of savvy and intelligence to create — usually. This means that there are an awful lot of blogs which actually have something interesting to say. All that is about to change as AOL brings blogs down to the lowest common denominator, much the way they did to electronic communication in general.
Oh, and as if to point out the average intelligence level of AOL subscribers, there’s this:
AOL has dubbed its service “AOL Journals” because its surveys showed that members found the word “blogs” confusing, said Rick Robinson, AOL’s vice president for community products.
But they don’t find AOL confusing?
“Up until now, a blog has required a certain about of savvy and intelligence to create”? Obviously you’ve never visited a LiveJournal
I’m not too worried about AOL’s journal service–they’ve made it clear that their tech team is going to “do this right,” with RSS & trackback & all those other goodies.
Ah, a good point.
I guess that my complaint is really that blogs are about to come to the masses; and that’ll ruin them the same way that cell phones, e-mail, and fax machines were ruined. I hate that point when a niche technology or social group/activity is made mainstream, and I have to find something new to make me feel outside the mainstream.