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Welcome to AOL 2.0! Can You Guess Which Company It Is?
Let’s start this journey by taking a ride back in time. Some of you are too young to remember the Internet of the early 90s. Back then one of the most popular ways to get “online” was to use AOL. This was the popular online service that came via disks you received in the mail. Prodigy and Compuserve were on their way out and this new service AOL was the darling of the time. I went to college in a small town in upstate New York which had no local number for AOL. I had to call to Albany to access AOL. And boy did I access AOL. One of my first months I received a phone bill for over $500 in long-distance charges (where was Vonage back then?!?) and that didn’t even include the AOL access fees. I still use the same username on AOL today that I originally registered way back then.
AOL was exciting – you could read news, send and receive email, play games, IM chat with friends, go into chat rooms based around topics, search for content, listen to music, send eCards, customize the home page to suit your preferences and a variety of other online tasks. In later versions of the AOL desktop, a Web browser was included and other “partners” were added to allow for additional content and, what I will call, applications.
It sure does seem that the more we try to move the Internet forward, the more things seem to copy the old. So with that said, allow me to introduce you to the next version of AOL… AOL 2.0… otherwise known as Facebook.
Read the above paragraph that begins with “AOL was exciting” and replace AOL with Facebook. Seem similar? Seem to be identical?
Facebook has news, buddies, chat/IM, games, video, photos and when you include their developer network you get pretty dang close to what AOL offered. I’m not going to run down every single feature in both services but if you were to create a matrix, the checkmarks would overlap pretty closely. One difference is the aggregated “feed” that Facebook offers which allows you to see what your friends (or marketing contacts) are up to.
Update: Doc Searls said the same thing about Facebook and AOL last month. You should read his post and comments as he discusses trying to keep up with all the content that is pushed his way.
Sure Facebook allows us to connect at higher speeds than an overclocked 28.8 baud modem, but if you look closely, I can see the little yellow running man inside the Facebook logo. I’d argue that if AOL had the connection speeds and coverage that Facebook benefits from today, AOL would have been much larger.
I’ve wondered if Facebook will eventually launch a branded phone similar to Google’s launch of the Nexus One smartphone. And there is a lot of chatter about the potential of Facebook to create a web browser. AOL had a web browser as well.
Facebook likes to say that they are open but I guess by their definition AOL was just as open in the mid-90s. One difference between the companies is in the way they generated revenue. AOL charged a service fee and Facebook is using ads and Facebook also told me tonight that Heinz Ketchup wants me to share my Ketchup stories (I never use Ketchup) and that two of my Facebook friends are “Fans” of Heinz Ketchup.
Let’s look at some recent posts from around the Web – just replace Facebook as you read the posts with AOL and replace any mentions of Obama with Clinton.
- Steve Rubel says that Facebook will centralize the social web. Isn’t that exactly what AOL did in the early-to-mid 90s?
- Facebook is the largest newsreader says Hitwise. Wasn’t AOL the largest online newsreader?
- Facebook is working on an internal email service says Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington. Along with many others, I said this would be coming. And lookie here, AOL had an email service as well. So now people will tell you to email blueriver149@facebook instead of blueriver149@aol.
So is Facebook really just a refurbished version of the old AOL?
[...] Stern – May 17th, 2010 Comment Last month Facebook, the company that is getting closer to AOL 2.0 everyday, launched their new social plugins which includes the new Like button. Lots of websites, [...]
[...] has been discussion on this issue time and again on the web. I personally think the web is resilient to any attempts to dominate it in the long [...]
[...] data sharing format and delivery method was released just as discussions began about Facebook being the modern version of AOL, walling off all their data and their users from the rest of the Internet. This is an important [...]
[...] this convergence a good thing? CenterNetworks talked about this problem a few days ago regarding Facebook and its parallels to AOL. Google is slowly headed in the same [...]
Been there, said that:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/01/05/facebook-is-the-borg/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/01/08/lets-call-it-a-twiver/
Thanks for stopping by Doc! I added your link to the post – you are a wise man.
@Ben: I don’t see any difference in what you said between AOL and FB. Everyone was using AOL, too; if people jump ship, then the ship will sink. It’s just a question of when the next big thing overwrites FB’s value prop.
Besides, isn’t AOL at version 10 or something? AOL 2.0 takes us back quite a ways, doesn’t it?
Michael – thanks for the comment – I was using 2.0 as the next version not specifically the AOL 2.0 version from like 1993 :)
The main difference is that anyone can join Facebook – and they have. You don’t have to be a US citizen or own a valid credit card. You don’t have to use a slow dial-up modem. In short, Facebook is more like Yahoo 2.0 than AOL 2.0, and Yahoo is still very much here.
To me it seems like facebook can’t die quite like AOL did/is/will die. People can’t just switch to a competing service. People’s friends use facebook. All of people’s friends use facebook. There would have to be a lightning-quick mass exodus of facebookers. This did happen with myspace, but that was before literally everyone had a myspace. Basically, as long as everyone is using facebook, everyone has to continue using facebook.
The comparison of Facebook to AOL is not a new one. I would suggest that while there have been similarities, they were more accurate before than they are now, and will be in the future. I believe Facebook’s goal is to be more open and discoverable, while AOL was not.
It is not a surprise that a popular network would have centralized e-mail, nor is it a surprise that people want to get news where they are on the Web. It’s fun to compare, but I think the long-term results will be much different.
I’d argue they are getting closer together. What does “open” mean to Facebook – I need to do some searches tomorrow for the answer.
I agree that the outcome should be different – AOL didn’t have the luxury of having the pipe handed to them for free like FB does. And hopefully FB has looked at the tapes of AOL and knows which plays not to run.
Vonage is AOL.20
Vonage hired half the marketing staff of AOL, bombarded the world with direct mail, then signed people up for life w/o telling them.
AOL IM > Facebook IM. AOL UI > Facebook UI. AOL chances for revenue > Facebook chances for revenue.