I rarely put post titles in all lower-case, but since this is an article about web 2.0, peer pressure kicked in. I figured I’d try to fit in – you know, be hip? Lower-case letters are “hip”, right?
My Relationship with AOL
I’m weird when it comes to social networking and online presence. In my crowd of “real life” friends, I’m one of very few people with a twitter account. In that respect, I suppose I’m forward-thinking. However, it wasn’t until very recently that I set up a myspace account. My “protest” wasn’t all that visionary, I admit. I needed to suck it up, it being my loathing of poor design, obnoxious advertising, and Rupert Murdoch.
In my computing history, the last five years, I’ve had one constant – AOL Instant Messenger, AIM. From the very beginning, AOL has been in my computing life. My family used AOL as our ISP for a few months before moving up to high-speed Internet access. In that time, AOL’s stronghold on the dial-up market established them as the instant messenger of choice for all of my born-in-the-90’s friends. Although I’ve long since dumped the official AIM client in favor of Pidgin or Adium, you’ll almost always find me on AOL’s network.
AIM Buddy Updates
AOL made a very interesting play that just came to my attention. The company launched a service called Buddy Updates, a status (away) message and buddy profile archiving feature. For someone used to having all content (away messages, buddy profiles) lost forever after alteration, this is a game-changer.
Although I feel ridiculous writing this, some people (rather foolishly) feel that AIM status messages are the last place they can quickly create content that won’t come back to bite them. With the default configuration of AIM Buddy Updates, this is no longer true. Before panicking, note that this feature is opt-out. Just go to the Buddy Updates website and login with your AIM username and password. From that interface, you’ll be able to shut the service off, but AOL’s hoping you’ll browse your friend’s recent activity (everyone), look at your content (just me), or setup the service (setup).
Impact?
AOL, a company that’s hemorrhaging money, is still making plays into Web 2.0. The idea of archived microblogging will be new to many users of AIM, but Buddy Updates still targets the more advanced social media user. That is, at the setup screen, users can add other web services, a la FriendFeed. Big names include Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, and MySpace. Yes, the omission of Facebook eludes me, too.
I have few complaints about FriendFeed, but competition is almost always good. Even if it’s just another redundant web 2.0 service, I think AOL is welcome to the party of content aggregation.