A Life For Itself

Tag: social media

  • Five Things – 26 July 2020

    I haven’t been blogging through the pandemic, nor through the recent social movement. I have lots of thoughts on why that is, and I may put some out there about that at another time, but one of the reasons is that I’ve been working mostly on new plays. I’ve been working on my latest full length and off, and on, a ten-minute play based on my most recently completed full-length. Or, perhaps that’s just an excuse.

    But not blogging or writing much of anything else, and feeling the urge again, is the main reason I decided to come back and blog again, at least weekly.

    I’m going to do my best to blog weekly, one or two items from the tech world, one or two from the arts world, and maybe one or two personal things. We’ll see how it goes.

    Instagram Fake, the Twitter Breach, and Social Trust

    A couple of weeks ago, I found out somebody had created a fake Instagram account using my name and my picture. Apparently, it had been created some time in June and I only found out because I was tagged in a post by a third account that roots out such fake accounts (big ups to them for this.) This was pretty surprising because I’m not a known name or anything, not yet. I didn’t think there was any value to impersonating somebody without much social visibility or trust or good will built up. At least not outside of people I personally know.

    And yet, there was the fake. Along with the new profile picture I’d most recently posted, this time, across all of my social media accounts, as my Gravatar, et. al. The account creator had lifted the verbiage from my Twitter profile, albeit without linking to this website or to my Keybase identity, both of which would have immediately exposed them as a fake. Not that posting on Instagram in different languages, not found on this site or in my other social media accounts, helped to establish any credibility any. Nor did not posting anything about Baltimore, which is one of my things.

    I reported the account and for a few days, it was still there. A friend of mine told me she’d gone through the same experience and had to send Instagram a picture of herself, holding a piece of identification. Fortunately, by the time I found my passport –I’d decided that was the ID I’d use instead of my license– and was about to take the picture, Instagram had already removed the offending account.

    I’m glad I didn’t have to go through the extra steps and all and while Instagram never notified me of the steps they took (which it says they’ll do when you report an account impersonating you), I would have liked to know if they decided that the offending account was truly the fake because I have these small measures of social trust posted online, e.g. my Keybase account and this website. I honestly thought about going live as proof that my account was the real one because while the offending account could certainly have downloaded any video out of my account and uploaded into theirs, Instagram would have at least known how the video was created –streamed directly into their service– and known that I’d made it and the copycat had not.

    Hopefully the Keybase account is good enough for at least techies to trust. At least it probably was before Zoom’s acquisition of Keybase. It may have been in this case. The offending account didn’t offer any form of social proof that they were me.

    Whether it’s Keybase or not, these forms of social trust are going to become more crucial in the future. Especially looking at the recent Twitter hack.

    As I mentioned before, my Keybase proof is in my Twitter profile. However, had I been a victim of the recent breach on that service, that would not have mattered, since the hackers had access to the service’s administrative console. They could have deleted any references to my Keybase proof. So, while there is some social trust in verified Twitter accounts, that trust now greatly rests on not just the user becoming verified, but also on practices like Twitter admins posting sensitive passwords with wide access in locations like Slack channels.

    I know this is a sensitive issue, especially inside the privacy community, and adopting specific means of identity verification, even like Keybase, is going to be difficult. But for the larger Internet, some kind of alternate means to say “this is the person you believe you’re communicating with” will probably become more important as we learn more about how some social networks operate.  Nothing compulsory, but a place where people can more reasonably trust that they’re communicating with the people they think they’re communicating with.

    In the meantime, I still have my Keybase account and it’s here:

    https://keybase.io/kesschristopher

    And remember, if an account online displays this proof, but the Keybase profile doesn’t point back to it, then it’s likely not me.  And you can come here to see if an online account says it’s me, but you have concerns.

    Thin Clients for the Masses

    I love thin clients, as quite a few folks I’ve worked with, will tell you. Not that they did. Most of the people that I asked, and even a bunch more that I never asked, and who volunteered this information, partly due to one frustration or another, did not. At least not the ones at the office, moreso the Wyse Winterms than the HP thin clients we eventually moved to, running Windows XP. At least, initially.

    Some of the same people did not like Chromebooks when they first came out, either.

    And now, coming next year, Microsoft will be releasing an Azure powered cloud PC. DaaS, Desktop as a service. Essentially a thin client. Probably for a subscription fee.

    According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, Windows loaded on a machine’s local storage, as we know it now, won’t be going away any time soon. But, what will be coming sounds like something that businesses, large and small, as well as some freelancers, will be interested in.

    For instance, say you’re a small nonprofit and you own a lot of legacy equipment and perhaps have an Office 365 subscription, but take advantage SaaS apps for functions like accounting and such, this may be more attractive than, say, buying a bunch of new PCs at once.

    Maybe you’re a large enterprise and you want to hand out laptops to users but don’t want them to be used off of your corporate network. Assuming Microsoft baked in IP address filtering into the service, it could prevent machines from booting anywhere but on the corporate network.

    Perhaps, down the line, you buy yourself a new Apple-silicon based Mac, but need access to a Windows desktop. Last I checked, the situation with software makers like VMWare and Parallels was unclear (even though Parallels will let you run Windows on a Chromebook in the future). This may end up being another case for Windows AAS.

    There may be lots of use cases in the corporate world.

    Depending on cost, I can certainly see some in the education world adopting this model. If there’s a need for certain software, yes. I’d imagine a company like nComputing, whose legacy equipment I’ve supported in an educational setting, developing hardware specifically for this Windows use case. And because of the pandemic, with public support for distance education at the K-12 level growing, being able to deliver a (more than likely) familiar Windows experience may have some value, as systems further refine their distance learning strategies.

    Hopefully, this news, coupled with Chromebooks still being popular as learning devices, larger conversations can be had about the digital divide, especially in places like Baltimore. Baltimore City Public Schools System (BCPSS) and the City of Baltimore, along with some local nonprofits, have been distributing Chromebooks to help with distance learning, often times disadvantaged areas. The problem has been that Chromebooks need to be connected to the Internet (I’m writing this on my original HP Chromebook 14) to reach their full functionality and the City has addressed this by distributing WiFi hotspots. But even with that, there have been complaints about the bandwidth and data amounts provided by the service being inadequate for the online instruction being offered as well as the availability of the devices to begin with.

    If companies are offering these tools and local school systems where there are inequalities of access, want to leverage these systems, there need to be real solutions for delivery. The value of systems like DaaS and hybrids like Chromebooks is predicated upon reliable, high speed Internet.

    Will I want to run out and get one of these Windows cloud PCs? If you have a .edu email address to share with me, then yes.

    Also, speaking of my coworkers, I told some years ago that desktop support as a job would be going away one day “in the not too distant future.” Well, if you’re a company running Windows, either in a data center or from the cloud, you have less need of someone to support desktops there in your office. Managed service providers, as long as those are around, will need people to support desktops remotely and sometimes in the office (seen that in action, personally), but even that should change some, the more that Microsoft moves things towards the cloud. It won’t happen in the spring or even perhaps for a few years, but if Microsoft can choose between allowing you to pay once for local Windows desktop or month-to-month for a Windows cloud subscription, I wonder which it will choose.

    TaaS – Theatre as a Service

    With the pandemic, theatre has moved online. I’ve seen more tweets and FB posts about theatres, large and small, here and there, offering one kind of performance or another, online. One playwright I’m friends with on Facebook has had weekly readings of his work for the last few weeks now. Broadway itself isn’t moving back into in-person performance until some time next spring. So, in the meantime, if you’re into theatre, you have to know how to work Zoom (which you probably do by now), Facebook, or YouTube. Theatre has become, hopefully for the time being, at least here in the US, a virtual service. Theatre as a service, if you will.

    I’m part of the fun too, as my latest ten-minute play, “Milton Avenue,” will be part of a group of readings by local Baltimore playwrights by Rapid Lemon, a local production company.

    Baseball

    Baseball came back the other night. It was surreal to hear all of this talk of MLB’s opening night while it’s hot and muggy out. We’re supposed to be seeing the top teams start to pull away going into August. But MLB is giving it a go, still, albeit without fans present. I don’t think any fans will see any MLB in person anywhere in 2020, assuming the league even makes it to the end of the season, which I’m struggling to see happening, at least not the way it started.

    I only say that because I’m less certain they’ll make it, than I am say, of the NBA and WNBA making it through their continuation and “full” seasons respectively. As it was reported, Juan Soto missed the other night’s Yankees/Nationals opener because he had been diagnosed with Covid-19. That test was administered on Tuesday, before that day’s Orioles/Nationals preseason game, in which Soto played. So, he had to have played while positive. And even as of the other night, all I heard in the media was that Soto had tested positive, but no word about his teammates. But he played around his teammates and around the Orioles. And this weekend, his teammates played around the Yankees. And this weekend, the O’s have played the Red Sox. And are supposed to be playing the Marlins tomorrow, with four players having tested positive.

    At least the NBA and WNBA are playing in bubbles with strict protocols about players entering and exiting the environment. They apparently tested completely free of the virus the other day. The bubble and the wubble have worked.  MLB is already stumbling. I am hoping for the best as I love baseball and while I’ve enjoyed KBO, staying up until 4 or 5 AM to watch it, has been tough (I like to watch sports live). Having said that, NC Dinos is my KBO team. I like their uniforms.

    Breathe, You Are Alive

    In the 2000s, I encountered the work of the Vietnamese Zen Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve enjoyed and found great wisdom in his teachings. One of my favorite ideas I’ve picked up from him is the phrase, “breathe, you are alive.” It’s the title of one of his many books.

    When in times of distress or upset, I learned to come back to my own breath. Come back to that center. And not to just breathe, but to feel it deeply and ground myself in my breath, in my body. I learned to feel gratitude for the breath because it was a reminder that yes, I was still here. And if I’m still here, I can feel better, think better, do better.

    How scary it feels to know there’s a virus running rampant still, whose main activity is taking away the breath. And whose long-term effects aren’t known.

    Mask up. Be safe.  Remember to come back to the breath.

  • The Facebook and Whatsapp Adventure

    I’m not a huge fan of Facebook. A decade or so ago, I had a professor (won’t divulge their name) ask me why I didn’t have a Facebook account, given that I worked in IT. The fact was surprising to them. However, that was the main reason I didn’t have a Facebook account. Back then, I even asked people not to even put my name into it, talk about me there, or even worse, put a picture of me, or any picture that I might have been in, into Facebook. I understood their privacy practices were questionable to say the least, and this was long before their activities hit the news and the consciousness of the general public.

    Eventually, I would break down and get a Facebook account, once I started to gain an interest in keeping in touch with people for whom I might not have another means of contact or whom I might not feel like texting. One of the attractive things about Facebook is convenience and you do pay for this convenience, even if it’s not in dollars. Understanding that, I still signed up, but with the understanding that I would never post anything to Facebook that:

    1. I either didn’t or wouldn’t post anywhere else.
    2. I didn’t mind anybody knowing about me, or knowing that I had said, that I might not have posted anywhere else.

    Nor would I go around friending everybody I knew.

    One of the things that I miss about Google+ is the concept of circles. In G+, you could put your contacts into circles, should you perhaps want to add context to your relationships to those people and even segregate them. For instance, why would I want a relative, someone I’ve probably known my whole life, possibly interacting with a coworker I’ve only known a short amount of time? Or even someone I’m not tight with, and possibly at odds with, interacting with someone I am tight with. Google+, I felt, left a lot less room for drama. On Facebook, you just had friends, and while there are some ways built in now to minimize the kind of drama I wasn’t interested in then, Facebook didn’t seem to care back then. It seemed like Facebook’s interest was just in knowing who you know, no matter what, for their advertising and other activities. One could argue that Google’s product was a little more nefarious, given that it did include the possibility of you adding context to your relationships, meaning that Google could get to know you a little better that way.

    Nor would I install their apps to my devices. Down the line, we’d find out how much data they were siphoning out of devices using their app. They were doing the same with cookies in the browser, but with apps like Firefox Focus, I could just delete the cookies after each session. And in Windows and on Chrome, I could just go into the browser settings and delete the cookies. When I started, I also used the app, Buffer, to send social media posts into Facebook, without the need to log fully in, until they took away Buffer’s ability to send posts to a personal profile. I see responses to any of my posts that way, but I didn’t care. I’d log in and see those later.

    I’d also eventually get an Instagram account once I started to get into photography and share some of my pictures until the recent situation where a news organization used a photographer’s picture without their permission. As of this writing, I’m leaving up pictures of myself (because I know nobody cares) and otherwise just using my own little platform to boost messages important to me.

    This has the extent of my interest in, and usage of, Facebook. No messenger on my phone. Anybody wanting to send me any messages directly could text me (good) or send me a message on Hangouts (better) or Signal, should it be something they wanted to really keep private. I never use it as SSO. I don’t link games and such to it. They already gather up enough other information about me, though, when I looked once at the stuff they were willing to tell you they had gathered about you, I was pleased to see that quite a bit of it was inaccurate. Nor was I ever going to correct any of it.

    I have joined groups and friended people, but Facebook didn’t need me to post there to know that I’m a playwright, that’s public. Nor that I’m an actor. That’s public, too. I’m affiliated with Laurel Mill Playhouse. That’s public too. And that’s stuff I want a lot of people knowing. Maybe they’ll be interested in coming to see a play of mine after the pandemic.

    So, I was happy with how I use Facebook.

    Then, I got a message from a friend who was starting up a group of interest to me.

    On Whatsapp.

    And at first, that seemed really like a bridge too far.

    Again, I’ve been happy with how I use Facebook. I didn’t want to go any further into it. Yes, I know Whatsapp is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted, using the same kind of encryption found inside of Signal. But, so long as the app is owned by Facebook, I’m not going to trust it fully. But I did decide I was going to somehow join the group. I decided I’d put it on my phone and not give it any permissions in Android settings. That way, I’d at least have the illusion of control over the app.

    What I did not know was that the app required a telephone number to sign up.

    That was a problem. I had no intention of putting my phone number into Facebook.

    Now, I know that anybody with my number who has signed up with Facebook and who has me in their contacts, and uploaded them, would have already given my number to Facebook. But that doesn’t mean that I need to verify this information. No. No phone number.

    But it was difficult to complete the signup without giving them one. I looked up some ways to subvert the process, but those looked a little too complicated, which would quickly become ironic.

    I decided I would sign up for a free number with Talkatone. I’d used Talkatone in the past before, when it tickled me that I could do so much texting on my (older) iPad. Eventually, I’d let it go and they’d close my account, but this seemed like the perfect time to join back up. All I needed was to receive a single text.

    And even better, I could sign up using Facebook. So, not only would I have a more or less burner text number, signing up using Facebook could, in theory, give them a number that they would know was mine and was good. Even though, from where I’m sitting, it’s far from.

    I complete the signup within the app and then tell Whatsapp to use that number as my number for the service. Nope. When the app reported having received Whatsapp’s verification text, it said that this was a premium text and I had to make a purchase within Whatsapp in order receive the text. I figured Talkatone must be a means that a lot of people have used to sign up for Whatsapp or other services and this was Talkatone’s way of making a few extra bucks. I wasn’t upset or nonplussed. That’s just how the online game works.

    And they’re far from the only app offering free texting. My next approach was TextFree, another free texting service I’d used in the past with my (old) iPad (I should do a post about free texting services one day). I signed up for another account and put the app on my iPod. This time, the verification SMS from Whatsapp didn’t even reach my inbox. I sent a message in from one of my Google Voice numbers and that went through, so I figured TextFree was outright blocking Whatsapp.

    I thought about going to Text+, yet another free texting service, but I didn’t want to keep creating new accounts on these services, even if they would end up holding nothing but Whatsapp verification messages. Instead, I decided to use one of my Google Voice numbers, which I did not want to do at first. But, I settled on the one I use the least and since I configured it to not ever ring to my phone, there was no harm in using it. And it’s the most disposable of all my Google Voice numbers, so if I needed to quickly change it for whatever reason, that would be fine too.

    So, I completed the signup with that number and joined the group.

    When I was doing the initial signup, I declined to give Whatsapp access to my contacts. Uploading them into Whatsapp was tantamount to uploading them into Facebook, which I’ve never done, and I have many more contacts than Facebook knows that I have, which is how I like it.

    After I was done signing up and joining the group, I decided to look around the app. I hit the new message button and the app explained that uploading my contacts was helpful, I guess, in finding out who I might know that used this app. Again, I declined, and this time, I checked the “don’t ask again” box because really, don’t ask me again. When I went back to the new message button, it told me that to help me message my friends and family, to go into Android permissions and turn on Contacts. When I tapped on “Not Now,” it went right back to the inbox. So, I guess you can’t initiate any conversations with anybody unless you give up your whole contacts list. Even if I know just one person who uses it, and even if they’ll know exactly who that one person is, they won’t allow you to just talk to them unless you tell them everybody you know. I’m guessing that this person could just initiate a conversation with you if they have your phone number, assuming that they themselves have uploaded their own contacts and are allowed to then send a message.

    I don’t think I know anybody else who uses the service and that’s all well and good. I also don’t need to know, since I have other ways of contacting people. I’ll just use the app for the group and delete it once it’s done.

    Updated: 14 May 2020

    Functionally, I get why they want you to upload your contacts. Comparing them with known users of the service makes it easier for you to connect with them through that service. I still don’t like that, given that I still don’t want to give Facebook any more information about me than they’ve been able to hoover up from all across the web (I do not use Facebook for sign-on into any other site, so that’s helpful and I limit my use of Google for this purpose where I can). It’s a shame because Whatsapp is a pretty cool app. And one of the best parts is the login on the web, which I use often for my previously mentioned group. I just hop on the computer, receive the daily message, send my reply, then log out and most importantly, clear out my cookies.

  • What Happened to AOL?

    When I do feel a need to reply to a YouTube video, I usually do so in the comments section. But this time, with a subject that’s near and dear to me, AOL, I felt I would have more to say than one should put into the comments section of a video, so I decided to make a blog post.

    First, a link to the video so you can watch and I’ll summarize the video’s thesis below.

    The video’s thesis is that what ultimately doomed AOL was the company’s inflated stock price during the 2000s .com bubble, combined with its ill-fated merger with Time Warner.

    I agree that this is the case, that once it became clear that AOL wasn’t going to be the sort of partner, or player, that Time Warner thought they’d be, that was it for AOL as it had been. However, I want go to into why this happened. I’ve long thought that the main reason that AOL went “away” –and was always going to go “away”– was that its business model was unsustainable in the long run. People talk now about Apple’s walled garden of services. If Apple of today is a walled garden, AOL was a fortress.

    The early 90’s weren’t necessarily the earliest days of the Internet, but compared to now, they might as well be. In those days, the Internet was a great mystery outside of the smaller number of techies and geeks and nerds. There was content, but the “World Wide Web,” websites reachable through a browser, e.g. NCSA Mosaic or Netscape, was significantly much smaller than today. In fact, when I started to get online, at school, USENET, an online system that probably most people online these days seldom ever hear about, seemed to be as big and important as the “World Wide Web.”

    To get to this information, you needed to have an early dial-up ISP, a role AOL would play for its own service and later on, for access to the Internet, but then you needed a web browser and know how to use it and where to go to get this information. In those days, you’d also need a USENET (news) reader to help you access any information (content) contained in that system, if you wanted it. For techies, geeks, nerds, etc., these weren’t necessarily huge hurdles to overcome.

    However, to the average person, the kind of person who nowadays probably uses Facebook as their main portal to the online world, these hurdles may have been untenable. For reference, even the major search engines weren’t around. Google didn’t exist until 1998. Yahoo didn’t exist until 1994. Alta Vista until 1995. Lycos, 1994. Who else remembers Excite and Webcrawler?

    The best we had before then were Gopher and Archie. You may not have ever heard of them.

    Step in, AOL. AOL did three things greatly that the Internet of the time did not:

    1. Make access easy
    2. Organize and develop content
    3. Facilitate communication

    Where the Internet as a whole might have been spooky and intimidating to a lot of people, AOL was the exact opposite. The software was readily available to you as AOL put their discs literally everywhere. And you didn’t have to know how to fire up a modem. All you had to do was click on AOL and off you went. Whenever you had an issue, you could call them on the phone or, if I remember correctly, chat with them within the system.

    Once you were logged in, everything was laid out and presented to you. Instead of having to use an search engine to find what you were looking for, AOL made it super simple to find. Entertainment, news, family stuff, all there, within one click. Yes, none of it was available beyond AOL, but for your average user, it didn’t need to be. AOL developed a lot of content, but as time moved forward, one thing AOL did really well was invite companies to establish online presences on AOL. So, the sorts of things that probably most people wanted to see were all right there. You weren’t going to find as much entertainment news or shopping outside of AOL in 1992 or 1993. And definitely not kids stuff. The web had a lot of seedy stuff back in those days, way before parental controls.

    There’s a reason why “You’ve got mail” became such an iconic phrase. Email was not nearly as ubiquitous then as it was now. Web communications in general were not. When the Chris of today, with a smartphone, email accounts, social media accounts, SMS, and on and on, thinks back to the Chris of the early 90s with just an AOL account to send and receive email and chat some, it’s so quaint. But getting just email back in the day was certainly not as easy as it is now, not since the invention of Yahoo mail in 1997. Back then, if you worked somewhere with email, and at that, an email system open to the web, you could have email. Or if you were a school or college student, you could get email. Or if you owned your own domain, there you go. If I remember correctly, some, but not all ISPs offered email addresses as an enticement to sign up, but webmail was not a thing then and obviously, neither were smart phones. I didn’t mind using a text based system for email nor setting up an email client. But I can’t think of too many others in my life who were interested.

    But when you logged into AOL, you had email. It literally would tell you the moment you logged in, if you had email. And you could chat directly with other users, just by knowing their name. You could participate in message boards too. Even though you were confined to the AOL service, all of the sorts of communication you could engage in on the larger web, were available to you.

    But, as the online world grew and more and more people and companies and services decided to move to the larger Internet, AOL faced a huge problem. While, to many people, AOL *was* the Internet^, more and more people, while still desiring to be part of AOL’s walled garden, wanted a back door to the actual Internet *through* AOL. AOL did not consider themselves to be an ISP, but purely an online service. They wanted you in their system where you would do all of your stuff, not the larger internet, because once you were on the larger, and growing internet, you might one day decide that you didn’t necessarily need AOL to find what you were looking for.

    By the late 90’s, AOL had opened up to the larger Internet. You could go into AOL and fire up a web browser and get to WWW sites through a browser inside of the window. By this time, you could access both AOL’s content as well as whatever was on the web. This had to be a major blow because, from the user perspective, this was indeed the first step to no longer needing AOL. They also allowed email from outside of AOL to reach their users.

    Even so, one of the bigger changes was the company made was AOL Instant Messenger, or, AIM. At first, the service allowed AOL users to chat with other users from an app outside of the main AOL software. Eventually, due to pressure from competing products like Yahoo Messenger, and eventually, MSN Messenger, AOL opened up AIM to anybody who wanted an account and you could chat with both AOL users and non-AOL users. AIM would outlive AOL’s dominance, but AIM was never something outside users paid for.

    My perspective has always been that by the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger announcement in 2000, the writing was on the wall for AOL. The larger Internet was growing. The dot com bubble would later on erase quite a few names from the Internet landscape, but that was a financial concern, not a technological one, nor a social one, and the appetite for more on the Internet was not slaked when the bubble would eventually burst. The bubble hit AOL yes, but by the time that this happened, their earlier business model, under which they’d had their largest successes was already becoming outdated. AOL might not have wanted to, but they were rapidly becoming just an ISP and no more. It was becoming impossible to wall off data and content. There was so much more coming to the web. Even the other conveniences AOL sold were no longer unique. For instance, email. As webmail started to come into its own, average users could get email very easily from Yahoo. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997.

    The stock market only revealed, in its way, what was true: that AOL was not, and would not, be the behemoth many thought it was. AOL may have understood the attention economy long before anybody else, but the way they crafted their company around it didn’t change with the times. And as AOL became no longer “the Internet” for more and more people, the game was surely going to be up.

    I’m reminded of the scene in Matrix Revolutions when the machines’ drill finally pierces through the Zion dome and the humans inside their mechs are shooting at the initial waves of sentinels. Sentinels fall and fall but eventually, a huge mass of sentinels breaches Zion, overwhelming the fire coming from the mechs. And once the sentinels are in, they overwhelm human forces.

    That’s how I think about the growth of content and communication on the Internet, the first couple of waves with AOL valiantly fighting them off. But the explosion surely came once broadband Internet started to pop up. At that point, aside from habit or the inability to have access to broadband, there was no reason to use AOL as a service. You didn’t have to dial up to get anywhere online anymore. You didn’t need AOL to curate your online experience anymore. And you could stay in contact with friends, family, and others with other apps.

    As is widely considered, the AOL/Time Warner merger is still one of the worst ever in corporate history. And yes, as Company Man says in the video, the stock took an historic hit alongside other online companies. But I think AOL, as a company, was pretty well doomed already. Just like other .com companies whose value wasn’t tied to anything but investors’ unchecked optimism about the coming Internet era, AOL was a company whose business was sure to be gutted in the upcoming years. I really wonder what kinds of forecasts they were writing for their financials by 2000.

    What’s really sad is that it didn’t see the winds blowing and pivot towards social media once Twitter and Facebook started to emerge on the scene. I’ll be always forced to wonder if, by its name alone, it could have become an early force in social networking, especially since, in some ways, it laid the groundwork for social media today.  What happened to AOL might not have had to happen.

    ^ I can not tell you the number of times I got frustrated and tired of explaining to people that AOL wasn’t synonymous with the Internet, but that it was strictly a self-contained service with its own existence apart from the Internet, whether you could access the Internet through it or not.

  • Godspeed, AIM (or, what AOL could have been)

    AIM Logo

    AOL was not the Internet.  In the early days, the late 80’s and early 90’s, they sold it to you as such, but it wasn’t.  You could get access to Usenet, and eventually to the larger Internet, but that’s another story.  Still, using the online service could be a fun experience and perhaps no part of the service outside of the iconic “You’ve Got Mail” sound was more popular than IM.  Before there were Twitter followers and Facebook “friends,” if you were on AOL, you had your buddy list.  Unless you used IRC or ICQ, bulletin boards, or some type of instant chat via a Unix system, chances are, you used AOL.  If you weren’t a techie, you almost certainly used AOL.

    Still, the presence of services like IRC or ICQ became a problem for AOL.  Before then, if you were an AOL user, you paid for that privilege.  AOL IM was part of AOL’s “walled garden,” its own content and subservices inside of the service.  IRC and ICQ allowed users to chat with anybody on the Internet.  Eventually, the noise from both AOL users and non-users to bridge to the Internet became too loud to ignore and in 1997, AOL opened up its IM service in the form of AOL Instant Messenger, or, AIM.

    Now, people on the Internet could chat with paying AOL customers.  Despite becoming the most popular chat service on the web over its rivals Yahoo!’s Pager (Messenger) and eventually, Microsoft, this represented a subtle shift for AOL, as they were essentially hosting non-paying users in their service (AOL would also buy ICQ in 1998).  AOL’s business model still involved people paying primarily for access to information and experiences hosted on their servers.  They were good at it as they still had tens of millions of paying subscribers, too, by the late 1990’s, let alone AIM users.  By 2000, AOL would merge with Time Warner, as the latter had seen the future and wanted to move into the online world, the former, into media.

    AIM soldiered on, even as its parent company declined in status, becoming more or less a division within Time Warner within a couple of years.  AOL would finally shift the whole company towards a more open service, away from their “walled garden” in the next several years, even opening up AOL Mail to non-paying users.  They’d also add XDrive, an online backup service, to their offerings.  None of it stemmed the tide away from AOL.  

    AIM itself wasn’t immune to shifts in technology and how people organized themselves online.  AIM itself would begin to fall away as a service as people would begin to move to SMS messaging and more importantly, social networking sites and Google Chat, itself released in 2011.  And only now in 2017 is AOL shutting down AIM.

    If I could have projected my 15, 20, or 25 year old self out to now, I would have recognized AOL, but under the name Facebook.  Stick a blog with comments onto an AOL/AIM profile and make the whole service — groups, messenger, AOL Hometown/Journal, business listings, etc — available to anyone and not just paid users and you have back then, a proto-Facebook service.

    I might recognize AOL as Box.com, Dropbox or Google Drive.  Only Box.com was around at the same time as XDrive.

    I might even see it as Hulu.  AOL, through its merger with Time Warner could have lead streaming, given how much content it controlled or nominally had access to, with all the shows from HBO, TNT, and the other Time Warner-owned networks under its umbrella by 2000.

    Yet, it wasn’t meant to be.

    AOL, for whatever reason, never figured out in AIM’s heyday what organizations like Facebook seemed to know when they launched: in the coming era, users weren’t necessarily the customers, but they were often the product.  AOL insisted on keeping paid subscribers long after they should have shifted to the attention-based model we see today.  Google, Facebook, and others raced by and left AOL reeling.  They would eventually open up more of the service and only charge for Internet access, but by then, things were too far gone.

    And with respect to the kind of content AOL should have monetized, by the time that Netflix and Hulu came around, AOL was well depreciated from its former self.

    AOL isn’t the only tech company that’s held onto its buggy whips as the rest of the industry moves towards the combustion engine.  

    Microsoft ignored mobile.  It’s not even a player in that space.  They had enough time to put together Office 365 and improved Sharepoint and OneDrive enough before Google Drive/GSpace could become a truly viable product.  They’ll still be  a player in cloud in the corporate space going forward.  They were also able to take enough cues from Apple (design) and Google (transitioning to a leaner, more cloud-focused OS) to keep Windows 10 relevant.  Unfortunately for AOL, they had the pieces (I didn’t even mention AOL Music or AOL photos), but never could put them together at the right time in the right ways.

    As I get ready to let go of my old Buddy List of over 100 people, I do have memories like I’ve seen expressed on Twitter today.  I’ve either met or kept up with a lot of people on AOL and AIM through the years.  Old girlfriends. Writers.  Early bloggers and online journalers (from the Open Diary days, wow that was so long ago, and maybe a few from BlackPlanet, too).  Some moved to GChat with me.  Some are long gone from my life.  Some even dated back to when I was in high school.  I’m sure I shared my grief over my mother’s death over AIM.  My giddiness when the Ravens won Super Bowl 35.  And many other moments and emotions between in days long passed.

    I’m also reminded that in tech, tools come and go.  I’ve used WordStar, ClarisWorks, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Libre Office to do the same thing.  ClarisWorks, Pagemaker, and Publisher to do some of the same things.  AOL, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Mesesenger (Windows Live Messenger), and Google Talk (Google Chat/Hangouts) to do the same thing.  And on and on.  Something else may eventually succeed Twitter and Facebook after some change that the future managers there didn’t see coming.  At one time, people thought AOL was the Internet and then the Internet passed it by.  Today, many people think Facebook is the Internet.  What will people think the Internet is in 20 years?

    Just like the story in Acres of Gold, the answers are sometimes right under your feet.  AOL had the pieces of this part of the future in its control and now all of those tools are have been and continue to be realized by other groups.  Yet, they held onto the world as it was, for too long, and when the world moved on, they couldn’t catch up.  Creativity, openness to new ideas, and the willingness to take a few risks are the way forward.  The former world can pass away so quickly these days, it’s often hard to hold onto.  Especially in tech with so many people sitting behind compilers these days, probably far more than the first time I ever sat in front of a C compiler back when AOL was the Internet.