A few weeks ago, we all heard that Facebook — the site where your real name and offline social connections are meant to rule supreme — was planning to launch an app that supported anonymous use. Today, Facebook announced their new product for real… and it sounds an awful lot like a phone-focused version of the chat rooms and message boards AOL brought into our living rooms 20 years ago. [More]
AOL
Facebook’s Next Big Thing: Bringing Back That AOL Chatroom Feeling
By 10.23.14
CompuServe In 1994: Here, You’ll Never Outgrow 60 E-Mails Per Month
By 9.5.14
Decades ago, our ancestors would purchase or receive in the mail “magazines,” primitive information delivery devices printed on shiny paper. Most of these magazines featured advertisements for products and services. In 1994, an ad for Popular Mechanics promoted CompuServe, a service that you could dial into with your modem. One that connected you to news, sports, weather, shopping, information, and included sixty e-mail messages per month. Sixty! [More]
AOL Raises Prices, Still Manages To Have 2.3 Million Subscribers
By 8.6.14
When you’re reporting your results to investors, it’s good to focus on the good news. For example, AOL is now taking in more money per subscriber each month: $20.86 compared to $20.03 at the same time last year. What’s that? Yes, of course AOL still has subscribers. [More]
AOL Still Has 2.4 Million Paying Subscribers
By 5.7.14
For most of our readers, AOL is is a distant memory: you probably still have an Instant Messenger account around somewhere, and your favorite aunt uses it for e-mail. Oh, and you think that they might own some sites you visit sometimes, like Joystiq and TechCrunch. However, even as it works hard at becoming a content company, AOL still earns a lot of money from selling Internet service to people, including dialup. [More]
Former AOL E-mail Users Report Spam Spewing From Zombie Accounts
By 4.29.14
Did you sneer at the mysterious AOL breach that has compromised some customers’ information because you don’t use AOL e-mail anymore? Yeah, about that. Some former AOL users have reported that messages went out under their former IDs. Are spammers forging messages from defunct addresses, or have these AOL accounts gone zombie? [More]
AOL Investigating Spam-Blasting Security Incident
By 4.28.14
AOL says that the company is investigating the recent torrent of junk mail that appeared to come from its customers, and unauthorized access to customers’ accounts by unknown baddies. While the good news is that customers’ payment information wasn’t breached, it’s still bad that their address books, passwords, answers to security questions, and their addresses may have been. [More]
Yep, AOL Admits E-Mail Accounts Were Compromised
By 4.22.14
If you’re getting weird junk mail from your friends, colleagues, and grandparents who use AOL for their e-mail, you’re not alone. In the last day, many AOL users have reported that messages were sent under their names that they never approved. Were their accounts hacked? Should you be concerned? The answer to both questions is “maybe.” [More]
8 Things Companies Have Said That Sounded Like April Fool’s Jokes But Sadly Weren’t
By 4.1.14
For the calendar-challenged, we’ll point out that today is April 1, meaning the Internet is full of phony products, fake stories, doctored photos… so, you know, it’s like most days on the Internet. Rather than serve up a “United Charges Upgrade Fee For Merely Being Jealous Of First-Class Passengers” headline, or a post about Comcast CEO Brian Roberts giving up his job to play Gretl Von Trapp in a regional theater production of The Sound of Music, we’re looking back at some stories that would have been appropriate for April Fool’s. [More]
The ’90s Are Dead: AOL Killing Off Its Iconic Moviefone Voice
By 2.24.14
We know, we know — the word “iconic” is overused. But we’re talking about the voice that greeted callers looking to hear movie times back in the 1990s, when such a service seemed ridiculously convenient (and I didn’t have any other boys to talk to on the phone). The Internet has killed off the Moviefone voice, as AOL says it’s planning to disconnect the line. [More]
AOL CEO Regrets Blaming Benefits Change On “Distressed Babies,” Reverses Unpopular Move
By 2.10.14
Late last week AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong announced that the company would be delaying company contributions to employee retirement accounts. That was enough to make workers grumble already, but then he added that the shift was partly due to two specific employees who had “distressed babies.” That didn’t go over so well, and the company has now reversed the benefits shift. [More]
It’s Nothing Personal: Hundreds Of Patch Employees Laid-Off During Conference Call
By 2.3.14
If you’re going to fire hundreds of employees, at least have the guts to do so individually. After years of dedicated, time-consuming work, hundreds of online media employees were let go during a series of conference calls last week; taking “it’s nothing personal” to an entirely new level. [More]
Despite High Hopes For Patch, AOL Is Now Winding Down The Hyperlocal News Site
By 12.16.13
It all started out so optimistic: When AOL’s chief executive Tim Armstrong came onboard from Google, his dream of a network of local news sites that would cover all the comings and goings of communities across the country seemed like it could work out. Patch got $50 million and the high hopes of its fans at AOL in 2009, but now the company says its days are numbered. [More]
How AOL Drove My 80-Year-Old Neighbor To Gmail
By 10.9.13
Sometimes you’re better off packing it in and walking away from an account, even a free one, when things just aren’t working anymore. That’s the conclusion that Josh’s octogenarian neighbor came to regarding her AOL account. AOL, when you aren’t even holding on to the senior citizen market, that’s a bad sign. [More]
1-In-5 American Adults Have Neither Smartphones Nor Home Broadband
By 8.26.13
It may seem like an oddity to see anyone still carrying a phone that is just that — a phone, but a new report shows that 44% of adults in the U.S. are still making calls on phones with no ability to go online. Americans are more accepting of broadband, with 70% of them having the higher-speed Internet access set up in their homes, meaning that some of those people without smartphones are choosing to pay for broadband. This leaves 20% of Americans over the age of 18 without either a smartphone or home broadband. [More]
Believe It Or Not, 2.58 Million People Still Pay For AOL Service
By 8.8.13
Remember those days when you had to use your landline and select which AOL phone number to dial into in order to connect for insanely slow Internet access? For most of us, dial-up is just a distant hazy memory, but for a couple million Americans, it’s still how they get online. [More]
Apple, Google, Facebook & Other Tech Giants Pen Letter Asking For NSA Transparency
By 7.18.13
In the wake of that whole thing where the National Security Agency is reportedly snooping on people, a whole bunch of tech industry giants have banded together with privacy advocates to send a letter to the lawmakers and President Barack Obama asking for some transparency when it comes to government surveillance. [More]
19-Year-Old Lives In AOL Offices For 2 Months, No One Notices
By 5.25.12
You know that co-worker who’s always there when you come in in the morning and also when you leave at night? Maybe their work ethic isn’t as amazing as you think. Maybe they don’t even work there, and are squatting in the office as a free place to sleep, eat, work out, bathe, and work on launching their own tech startup. [More]
Dial-Up Won't Die: AOL Signed Up 200K New Customers In Last Year
By 11.4.11
Even though we’re well past the age of AOL’s ubiquitous free trial CDs, the shrunken ISP giant still manages to coax hundreds of thousands of new customers into its antiquated dial-up service. According to its earnings report, the company added 200,000 new customers while losing 630,000 users in the past year. Shockingly, 3.5 million users still greet the internet with the nostalgic, ear-splitting sound of their landlines connecting to the internet. [More]
