The article missed discussing in detail how AOL Keywords and their walled garden of apparent “websites” was huge. So many major companies had pages on AOL and for many, that was the internet.
The story of them losing a grip over the power of keywords to true websites was almost the final blow in transitioning AOL from an internet unto its own, to yet another ISP that had little to differentiate itself from others except price (especially as their all in one chat, email, browsing client aged horribly as countless other upstarts brought efficient and feature-rich clients to market).
Every commercial had the AOL keyword in it. Increasingly available DSL and cable connectivity made AOL useless, I think a some of early Google success was helping people use “keywords” on the real internet.
CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL (I used them all at one point or another) were all competing for the walled garden that AOL ultimately succeeded in. They absolutely were “the Internet” for most users for a time, and justifiably so: they existed well before commercial ISPs were available to the public, and were developed either before or concurrently with the Internet (not the Web, which came later).
Recall that these services offered Usenet access (newsgroups for discussions, before they devolved into what they are today), commercial portals, online games, personal pages, and even Web access eventually… and everyone was there. For a user at the time, even after commercial ISPs emerged, the value proposition was fully in favor of these information services.
Over time the Web continued to evolve but the clunky browsers included with these services couldn’t keep up in features. Also, online games like Quake 2 required an actual Internet connection. Eventually it just made sense to move on, but there was a sense of “giving something up” in making the switch.
Everyone of a certain age had an AOL email address, and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.
Fun fact: because AOL shut down Hometowns (and the tens of millions of websites it hosted) in the late 2000s with only one month’s notice, Jason Scott was so incensed that he created Archive Team, which archived a chunk of GeoCities and many other platforms since then. Too bad Hometowns couldn’t be saved, but GeoCities was the real prize IMO, so I suppose it’s good it happened first.
Those AOL email addresses didn’t disappear either. I recently discovered I have an @aim.com address with my crappy high school AIM screenname that was happy to accept new messages. I’m tempted to move some higher value things to it since it has never been published anywhere other than the buddy list.
and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.
In Russia ICQ played the same role for an IM (it’s the same OSCAR protocol), but it (I think owned by AOL too) killed itself by trying to lose alternative clients.
I used the official one for Windows only, but it was a more civilized age, and what they were breaking included clients for Java phones (it was not so rare to hear the ICQ notification sound in public transport), clients like QIP, Miranda, Trillian which were used by many people, clients for Linux and so on.
Then everybody moved on to Skype. It happened very fast, in a couple of months my buddy list went mostly red from mostly green.
I always loved getting free writable floppies in the mail from them! Their service was useless to me, but the floppies sure weren’t. Then they switched to CDs, which went directly from mailbox to trash, and I was very sad.
My roommate and I taped the CDs to the wall as a makeshift mirror. 😄
Are you sure those CDs couldn’t be re-used? I’ve got some promotional DVD that could still be re-used. It only had like 70MB written. You could just format it, and use the rest. I did that stuff multiple times. (But not all of them are recordable)
Once you get into serious quantity, getting a “plain” (Read-only) CD or DVD manufactured is much cheaper than rewritable. AOL was junkmail-bombing the entire country.
At the time, CD writers were not a common thing. Supposedly, CD-RW that could be rewritten debuted in 1997. AOL wouldn’t have been giving those out. You paid a premium for them compared to the write-once CD-R, which is what most people I knew who burned CDs at home were using. AOL just sent mass-pressed CD-ROMs.
It would be interesting to know how much waste their CD mailing campaign produced. I think it would be a nice gesture to recognize their accomplishment with a monument: the Steve Case Memorial Landfill.
There’s one little twist in this story that isn’t mentioned, and I’ve never quite understood. When the NSFnet started to upgrade from the T1 backbone to the T3 backbone in 1990, they formed a company called ANS (Advanced Network and Services) to run it.
When the T3 backbone got shut down in 1995, (most of) ANS was sold to… AOL.
Weird.
AOL was ‘everywhere’ especially in the mid to latter '90’s. Their advertising push coupled with so many hours of free Internet access upon installation made them an early titan of Internet service access.
A early walled garden. Isn’t it cute.
Now find me on Facebook using keyword totally not a scam
I’ve been wondering if the AOL walled garden works as a metaphor for the non-fediverse Internet.
For my friends old enough to remember pre-Internet AOL, I have described the difficulties getting your mind around fediverse concepts as similar to the paradigm shift we all went through when first wandering out from AOL onto the open World Wide Web (ie, HTTP websites).
What do you mean, there’s more than one area to talk about the latest episode of Friends?! Isn’t that confusing? How do you know where to go for that content?
In AOL, I can just enter a keword. What’s this about a search engine? Why do I need to use some unrelated website, like Hotbot, to find out where people are talking about Friends?
For a couple of my friends, this analogy has sparked their openness to digging in a little and learning about Lemmy, etc, and it’s made then more forgiving of the fact that certain aspects are not intuitive right off the bat.
By the way, if you want the full “AOL experience,” someone’s been rebuilding all the AOL server APIs to support the old Windows client. It even supports the original Neverwinter Nights (the AOL online D&D gold box game)!
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