Going back 10 or 15 years, I remember all the talk about how AOL (America Online) was dead. How a proprietary version of the Internet, sanitized, simply was no longer necessary, now that the basic Internet tools were so easy to use, and only getting more so. The Internet had become accessbile to the general user. We could easily access discussion boards, email and graphical content over easy to use Internet tools. AOL seemed like the bunny slope of the Internet. Sure there was some otherwise unavailable content and games, but in order to use it it felt as though one had to give up the infinite wonder of the Internet. It was a proprietary network which made it easy to access content and connect with friends (and play games!), but we could do all that over the Internet itself. [For the sake of full disclosure, I should say I never had an AOL account].
Now, more than a decade later, it’s been many years since we’ve had discussions of what to do with AOL CDs. We look at the technology landscape, and AOL seems a cautionary tale, a dinosaur from the early days of dot-com.
Now, it’s all about facebook. You know, that proprietary network which makes it easy to connect with friends, access content and play games. Of course it’s also got messaging–which looks a lot like a proprietary email system–instant messaging and discussion boards. We’ve recreated AOL (though it doesn’t inform us chipperly “You’ve Got Mail”). How did that happen?
The Internet got too big. Too many tools. Email, chat, microblogging, blogging, gaming, discussion boards. We wanted to be able to have all of our friends in a single interface, and to share things with each other. And we wanted it to be easy, all inside the browser.
There are certainly those who dislike facebook–for many of the same reasons we eschewed AOL. But on the whole, we love our facebook (and I, as much as anyone, am an afficianado of facebook). And while I can suggest reasons for the recreation of the proprietary Internet experience, I’m not sure I can really make sense of it.
AOL (and compuserve, etc.) are dead. Long live facebook.
