AOL Getting Divorced
It was somewhat disturbing to see 40-foot AOL banners plastered everywhere, at a recent advertising event in NYC. It seemed like fascist propaganda at first, with banners towering over an anxious crowd inside an event space, all waiting to hear about social media. But propaganda in the vintage sense – like a museum display, or movie set. I mean, does anyone believe AOL is still in the game?
On Dec. 9th 2009, AOL is getting divorced from Time Warner. Which bookends one of the biggest head-turners of the dot-com bubble (ver. 1), when AOL bought the world’s largest media entity (Warner Bros, HBO, CNN) for $162 billion. After Wednesday, AOL is going solo and will be moving into a shared apartment with CompuServe and Prodigy.
However, it’s the new campaign AOL is taking to stay relevant in the Web 2.0 era that’s garnered our attention. What they’ve essentially done is take their only still viable product, AIM instant messager, and reconfigure it to blast updates at your screen every time someone touches Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc… Even some shit called delicious. It’d be like if AOL found out you liked celebrities – and then encircled your desk with televisions blasting Extra, Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight – all while you try to work.
Essentially it’s what we love about the ‘boomer mentality – when in doubt just plaster your homepage with social networking logos. It’s just like taking a letter from Publisher’s Clearinghouse down to the check cashing center. Just because your site is plastered with Twitter and Facebook logos, that doesn’t equate to a digital payday. Literally, it’s as heavy-handed as those guys that try to convey they’re a player by putting up posters of Carmen Electra, Lamborghinis and St. Pauli beer girls on their wall.
Now, how did you happen to see the above AOL adverts, you ask? Well, I happen to still use AOL in the year 2009. It’s part of some hipster conceit that I’m trying to pioneer. The same way vintage Nike’s, retro T-shirts and old movies are cool – well the same should equally apply to the online experience. Imagine if some guy hosted his resume on a GeoCities page today and had you write him at “ninjapanda@prodigy.net.” That’s way more interesting than contacting walter.lastname@gmail.com. Not to mention how Google is the evil empire and openly admits to scoring your personal communiques for keywords to build a trackable advertising profile off of. Does AOL not read your private mail? I’m not even sure they can retrieve stuff I’ve accidentally deleted. Forget about advanced stuff, like reading my journal at night with a flashlight.
Granted I’ve been with the same account from Q-Link, through 300-baud dial-up days, right up to having AIM co-opted by social media. So I’ve essentially had the same contact address since ’93 and at this point, I’m the Benjamin Button of electronic mail. That said, I consider myself an anachronism and can’t imagine why people would opt for AOL today – to do anything. If you speak to anyone who maintains corporate sites, they’ll tell you the biggest problem is with people today still using the AOL browser. Not IE, Firefox, Safari, etc… The AOL browser. Which doesn’t work with any of today’s environments and accounts for almost a quarter of all complaints from old people, about sites not working properly.
That said, AOL is so shitty that it has become workplace acceptable for instant messaging. I mean, why else would anyone be on it? People use AIM for intra-office contact and snide comments made discreetly during conference calls. Whereas if anyone sees five G-Chat windows open on your screen – then you’re clearly not working. Five AIM windows, though? Way to fucking go, on managing that crisis!
So I guess AOL is here to stay for awhile. The good news is now Grandma can keep you up to date on what’s on sale this week, via Twitter. Which is great. Because essentially, social media is meant to exclusively connect you to coworkers, obese people from elementary school and everyone else you want to keep as far away from as possible.
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