Facebook is the New AOL

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Topic: Facebook is the New AOL (Read 1667 times)

Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in

Facebook is the New AOL
« on: 2010-12-06 03:14:36 »

Oh, Snap!
-----------------------------
Facebook is the New AOL
ARTICLE DATE: 11.15.10
By John C. Dvorak

Ever since last week's rumors began about the new Facebook e-mail system supposedly designed to kill Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, I began to wonder why I'm not more enamored with the service. And now I think I know why. I see Facebook as the next iteration of AOL.

I was never a huge fan of AOL once the Internet came along. It had its moments, yes, back when the competition was BBS systems and peer-to-peer download sites. But once dial-up went away, the service began to fall apart and never fully modernized. If it could have modernized, it would be exactly like Facebook.

Facebook offers a closed experience much like AOL; it's comfortable place people go and check in. All that was ever missing from Facebook to make the relation more obvious was e-mail and a deep voice saying "You've got mail."

In this analogy, MySpace is actually Compuserve. Myspace is a little rougher edged than Facebook, just as Compuserve was a rougher edged version of AOL.

When the Internet came along, there was a lot of denial regarding the future of these services, and they managed to stay afloat by becoming conduits into the Internet when they should have been conduits from the Internet. The model was backwards.

Eventually, AOL bought Compuserve, and right at the peak of its popularity, it managed to merge with Time-Warner before its long slide to marginalization.

Facebook is AOL II. Only it began where AOL left off. If Facebook decides to buy MySpace sometime in the future, the analogy would be perfect.

In the end, AOL was stopped by the invention of the World Wide Web. And it took six or seven years before anyone noticed that the Internet gave you everything AOL gave you, only for free.

What's interesting to me about Facebook is that the user paradigm is skewed to be user-centric rather than Facebook-centric. Or so it seems. Everyone has their own virtual website with everything is centered around it. MySpace also uses this model. This was pioneered by LiveJournal, from what I can tell, but was taken to the extreme by MySpace then perfected by Facebook.

It was a different era when AOL was around, and this inside-out concept was never considered. The MySpace/Facebook idea is also different from the vanity pages and Geocities concepts because it's more like a gated community (like LiveJournal) than just tract homes (Geocities).

I was never sure that any of these folks actually knew what they were doing, but instead thought they were flying by their seat of their pants. Seeing that it has taken so long to add the email paradigm just confirms it my assumtion. Even the name "Face" "Book" is moronic, although I've never heard anyone point that out.

In other words, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook are all sitting ducks for a genuine visionary who can take this to the next level. I sure hope Facebook isn't the end of the lineage. And since it took so long to bury AOL once the process began, we can expect the same with Facebook, but in the meantime, we'll just keep hearing more and more and more about Facebook in the years ahead. Ugh.

Copyright (c) 2010 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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