Does Facebook remind anyone else of…

May 7th, 2012

…America Online circa 2000?

In case I’m being too ambiguous, cialis sale health I remember when AOL was the Internet juggernaut that would last forever. I suspect Mark Zuckerberg and Stever Case might end up side-by-side on bar stools commiserating one day.

Entry Filed under: Observations

4 Comments Add your own

  • 1. Nick  |  May 7th, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    I can understand why you think that, and I think some comparison may be valid. However, I think AOL is somewhat different than Facebook.

    AOL was really just a different walled off version of the Internet. At the time, you could go into an AOL chat room, or IRC. There were different AOL features that resembled News Groups as well. In fact, most parts of the larger internet that existed, had a corollary in AOL (except for porn sites of course).

    In some ways, Facebook is the same. You can put your photos on Flickr, and status updates on Twitter, and play games on dozens of different sites. What Facebook is good at, is aggregating all these together.

    More importantly, AOL cost money. Facebook is “free”. So maybe the only real difference is that Facebook just found the right way to charge for the same sort of service. And sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.

    Also take into consideration that Facebook does not make the same mistake that AOL does, which is combining content with content delivery.

  • 2. Elliot  |  May 7th, 2012 at 4:08 pm

    Your comment is longer than my original post…which I think means you win.

    Seriously, good points.

    But I really won’t be surprised if/when Facebook follows MySpace into the great trash pile of history.

  • 3. Nick  |  May 8th, 2012 at 8:58 am

    The only mistake that MySpace made is that they stopped innovating. MySpace today doesn’t look all that much different than when it was first created, except Tom is your only friend there now.

    You know those complaints you see on Facebook every 3-4 months, where someone starts a group demanding that they “Bring back the old Facebook”, which happens to be the new Facebook that they hated just 4 months before that? Those complaints are Facebook not being MySpace.

  • 4. John Foust  |  May 8th, 2012 at 10:58 pm

    John Dvorak said it a year ago.

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