Compuserve's sprawling, paleolithic forums were acquired along with Compuserve itself by AOL in 1998, and their fossil remains were augmented, year after year, decade after decade, by die-hard users who continued to participate there. Read the rest
AIM, Aol's instant messaging service, is to shut down December 15 after 20 years of operation. Once a near-universal form of communication for a certain generation of internet users--even those who wouldn't be caught dead paying for Aol's internet service!--AIM slowly faded in the age of Google and Slack and ultimately died of corporate abuse and neglect. They are, however, collecting "Aimemories" to remember the good times by.
All good things come to an end. On Dec 15, we'll bid farewell to AIM. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories https://t.co/b6cjR2tSuU pic.twitter.com/V09Fl7EPMx
— AIM (@aim) October 6, 2017
Indiana laws permit public officials to use personal email accounts for government business, so it does not appear that vice-president Mike Pence violated any laws when he opted to use his personal AOL account to communicate sensitive governmental information; however, he certainly thwarted the state's open records laws, and also exposed that information to hackers who made off with it. Read the rest
When you logged into AOL in the 1990s, you were greeted with the voice of Elwood Edwards. Last night, Brandee Barker was headed to one of Hillary Clinton's Ohio campaign headquarters for canvassing when she happened to meet Edwards. He was her Uber driver!
OMG OMG my @Uber driver in Ohio was the You've Got Mail voice Elwood Edwards!!! I made him say it in this video #GOTVforHRC pic.twitter.com/Jgcl7v040D
— Brandee Barker (@brandee) November 5, 2016
Edwards, a longtime voice actor, recorded the famous famous phrase -- along with others like "Welcome," "File's Done" and "Goodbye" -- because of his wife. Back in the late 80s she worked for Quantum Computer Services, the company that would later become AOL, and she overheard the company's CEO saying he wanted a voice to notify people when they receive email.
She told them about her husband, he recorded the phrases on a cassette tape and became the internet's voice. He was paid $200 for the voice over, he told Barker.
In addition to his voice over work, Edwards worked for several years as a news editor at a TV station in Cleveland before recently retiring.
Twenty-one years ago, Yahoo became the soul of the nascent web. Now it's telco food, to be eaten by Verizon for $5bn.
Verizon is also the proud owner of AOL, snagged last year for $4.4bn. At their height, the two lynchpins of the 90s' WWW were worth about $350 billion—at least to those unlucky enough to buy tech shares in 2000.
Verizon plans to unite the two companies to create a Facebook-killer made of nostalgia and its own users' personal information—and the zoo of startups and internet publishers the two companies gobbled up in their dying years.
The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook.
Verizon bought AOL - another faded internet star -in a $4.4bn deal last year, which gave it ownership of the Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Engadget and other news sites.
Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers - which is tied to their handsets - with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites.
Update: It struck me that Yahoo is custodian of Tumblr and Yahoo Answers, two of the last real refuges for girls and young women on the 'net. Verizon will want to kill or heavily sanitize both. Read the rest
Long before Siri and Alexa, there was good ol' Elwood Edwards. If you ever logged on to America Online in the 1990s, you enjoyed the dopamine rush of Edwards cheerfully informing you that "You've got mail!"
Quartz tells the history of AOL, 1997-2011, through clues and answers in the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. They did it using their simple app for searching NYT Crossword clues. Above, "105-Across: Co. that owns Moviefone" Read the rest
A few days ago, AOL fired the staff developing AIM, its long-running instant messaging system. Having done this, it reset user accounts, locking them out of third-party IM clients until they confirmed and updated decade-old personal information. Having done so, I was displeased at such a shameless data mining ploy and tried to cancel AOL/AIM entirely. This is what resulted:
Bear in mind that I was already logged in and could change any account setting I pleased. Who knew that when AOL said it has "no plans" to end service, it was responding to customer demands? Read the rest
AOL is the latest advertiser to bail on radio host Rush Limbaugh following his description of activist Sandra Fluke as as a "slut" and "prostitute". Reuters' Anthony De Rosa cites an AOL source as saying it's "working on" removing Rush-linked promotions from the site.
It's strange to think of website so vast and operationally complicated that one is literally incapable of changing what's on it in a hurry. Perhaps the servers are ringed by moats of lava and defended by crocodiles. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
UPDATE. Say hello to bg_hero-NoRush.jpg, who lacks Rush's weirdly coquettish stance, but hints at a greater majesty with his purple attire and Mediterranean countenance. Read the rest
