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AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

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Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#101

Post by dalbasal »

The AOL story is foundational, IMO, to gain an understanding of the business.

To me, the most instructive part is the open web's triumphalism at defeating AOL.

AOL thought they could own the internet by controlling the front door... portal strategy, in the terms of the times. They expected to brute force their way to scale with expensive marketing campaigns. etc

Once the www "won," everyone knew how foolish AOL was. Information wanted to be free. Open protocols will run circles around a closed kludge. etc.

It's very 90s. A sort of peak modernism. Openness wasn't just desirable and effective... it was also inevitable. Maybe we needed to watch for network neutrality, but otherwise things would look after themselves.

Freedom isn't just better. It's so much more effective, more popular and powerful than short sighted alternatives that it is inevitable. This optimism was so powerful, we got completely blindsided a few years later.

In retrospect, AOL's strategic vision was prophetic. Their flaw was not pushing it hard enough, not having enough belief, giving up too early. Maybe they couldn't own everything, but they could have owned a lot. Even if they had just held onto the lest sophisticated users, chatrooms and news they would have been a goog/fb/amzn.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#102

Post by smcl »

georgeburdell wrote: post #96
smcl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)

I was a teenager on the tail end of dialup, so no hourly fee, but my parents got awfully mad if I tied up our phone line all day playing online games. They’d randomly call home a few times a day to ensure compliance.

Yep I had that too :-)

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#103

Post by zelphirkalt »

AOL was an experience. When one did not know better and only knew one could "go online" via that AOL thing, which one would start on the computer, it could easily seem like AOL was _the way_ to use the Internet or even _was_ the Internet. With so many AOL CD-ROMs flying around with "90 minutes gratis", I wondered, why we did not collect those to get more of that Internet. It took quite some time to understand, that the Internet was not AOL and that there were other ways to visit websites.

This is probably similar to how the Internet must feel in countries, where the Internet is only accessible through walled Facebook gardens. With less or less sophisticated surveillance/tracking technology dystopia, I guess.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#104

Post by grose »

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#105

Post by aeno »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #41
soared wrote: post #25

This era of computers slightly predates me so it’s difficult to understand the context - aol was a desktop application installed via cd that have you connection to other users and access to content somehow, but not via the internet?

Yes, exactly. It was a BBS with larger scale and a GUI. You dial into it, and you're in their walled garden -- stuff on AOL was not accessible from the wider Internet, and at first, AOL provided no access to the Internet at large. Eventually they added it, and the Internet grew in scale and quality far faster than AOL could match with their own content. AOL's brand name was huge, in no small part to their constant ca…

I remember seeing these CD displays at every corner, from malls to small kiosks. They were everywhere. And so, kids grabbed them and played frisbee with them right on the streets. So, these CDs were lying all over the ground. In every street, at bus stops, playgrounds. Everywhere.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#106

Post by inquirerGeneral »

grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

[dead]

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#107

Post by tortue0 »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #85
jandrese wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.

If you use a VPN you get CloudFlare captchas all the time

ddos as a service providers (aka booters/stressers) proxy L7 request floods via VPN providers. At some point the VPN providers might actually care to kill off those accounts / better tighten up their free tiers, but they don't care at the moment.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#109

Post by olig15 »

grose wrote: post #104

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…

I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#110

Post by poisonborz »

jandrese wrote: post #75
superkuh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL tried to spread the perception it was the internet and so should be the one chosing which internet resources were available for you. It wasn't really wasn't though. It was just a small walled garden in a bigger internet. Cloudflare on the otherhand, by it's sheer cheap utility, has inserted itself between a significant number of the top websites (and other internet services to a lesser extent) on the internet as…

Do you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.

The key here is "not yet". But try to use a public VPN/proxy IP to get a peek incoming future.
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