AOL's Sophie's Choice Moment
I once 
considered AOL a relic, a doddering giant foundering without direction and burdened with legacy ideas and technology.
Not any more.
Start with the AOL People Connection, where naturally evolving blogging, dating, and image sharing communities become formalized and juiced with extra resources. Or the Calcanis project reshaping Netscape.com into a peer news filter.
The AOL of ten years' ago, even of five years' ago, wouldn't have been up for this kind of rapid evolution and leadership.
AOL's messaging family shows this managerial focus and maturity too. Read Andy Abramson's Requiem For The Future of VoIP. He explains AOL's closing of the AOL TotalTalk service as strategic abandonment of a commodity market in favor of AIM PhoneLine, "a true Phone 2.0 child and the future of voice." A walk through the reasoning with Andy shows strong situational awareness and readiness to act.
I'm also excited for their AIM platform evangelism. It opens their AIM technical architecture as web services. It's still only months old, but the words are right and they're hustling for geek attention. Now if they'd just do it across all their properties. It's prerequisite when competing for developers with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.
I'm glad to know aging fools, like myself, can get their act together.
Comments
The recent acquisition of Userplane by AOL is a harbinger of things to come. We'll see how Userplane's presence on Myspace and 100,000 other sites expands the AOL community and vice versa. That's much more interesting to watch than adoption of free phone numbers or yet another social networking site IMHO.
Netscape as Digg clone is a nice try, we'll see how open AOL gets once they start losing people because nobody is going to come to AOL from other ecosystems it's like letting air out of a bag.
Posted by: relaxedguy | September 2, 2006 10:54 AM