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Somebody shoot me....
Dec. 11th, 2011 03:13 pmbecause I'm suddenly finding myself missing AOL.
Okay, not all of it. Certainly not the monthly charges that (dirty little secret) millions of people are still paying to Arianna Huffingandpuffington for dial-up access when they haven't heard a screechy modem sound in their home in years. Likewise, I certainly don't miss the speedy access provided by such devices, or their busy signals, or the "goodbye" sounds of their frequent glitches. But at least twice today, I've been reminded of things they kinda did well.
IM's, for one. The closest equivalent I have for them is the Facebook chat feature, and I rarely use it because of how they've gorked it. The beginning of the end for me was when they morphed their equivalent of a "buddy list" into that grid of teeny profile picture icons that are effectively useless. You can workaround that into having it show a chat list on your right sidebar, but it has to be manually activated each time you access your feed, and it also includes random folks who are not even signed on.
Once you're actually chatting, you run into the dreaded enter-key problem. Any time you hit it to split a paragraph, or mistake it for the ' key, you SEND. Unlike AOL IM'ing (which actually defaulted the opposite way and assumed you didn't want to send unless you hit an onscreen SEND button), there are no options I can find for changing this. So most of the people I chat with are now sharing at least one F-bomb per session with me as I, or they, or usually both of us, screw that up.
Most recently, they've integrated chat into the messaging system, which means that chat sessions never end, and are all recorded in perpetuity. It's kind of distracting when I open a chat window with Julie to see if she can bring Christmas cards to class for me to buy, and I wind up looking at a message about the exact time of a class we had together back in August. There doesn't seem to be any way to change these defaults, either.
Maybe G+ is better at this. Or maybe I just need to put AIM on this machine, assuming there even IS such a thing anymore.
----
The other thing AOL used to do very well is welcome the young while taking meaningful steps to protect them. I thought about this earlier today when seeing this article about how our two other big online behemoths- Apple and Amazon- handle the business of the Utes of America. In short, both make it almost impossible for parents to provide unique iDentities to their kids if they're under 13. As a result, their own desired apps and music purchases can only be made through, and then accessed on, the parents' devices using their own accounts- and the kids thus get access to whatever growner-upper material may be on Mom and/or Dad's machines. If the intent is to protect kids, it clearly isn't working: as one commenter to that article put it:
Don’t forget Spotify either. They currently have no kind of ratings system so imagine what happened when my 8 year old was searching for Cee Lo Green songs…
These cutting-edge trendsetters are either ignoring, or affirmatively avoiding, a simple method used in those dumbass boat-anchor PC's since, what, Windows 98?- the ability to load separate account settings for Mom, Dad or Junior onto the same physical piece of hardware, keeping the latter from getting access to the real words to Camilla the Chicken's song from the Muppets movie. AOL even had a 14.4-baud leg up on these guys back in the mid-90s: you created age-appropriate separate accounts for your kids, letting them advance from child to "young teen" to, finally, full access as they showed ability and trustworthiness at those stages. (Of course some kids got round those limits, but you at least had a fairer shot at letting it happen.)
There's also stuff in that article about how bizarre Kindle is in not letting you share a book among household members, even on the same device: if a Kindle is being shared by a family, but each family member has their own Amazon account? You have to deregister the Kindle from the current account and then reregister it to the new one. Yet another good reason why I've gone with a Droid-based tablet from my Guru rather than the Kindle Fire he was having me consider.
I wonder if it has a built in phone jack for the new AOL 4.0. I hear they have 16-letter screennames now!
Okay, not all of it. Certainly not the monthly charges that (dirty little secret) millions of people are still paying to Arianna Huffingandpuffington for dial-up access when they haven't heard a screechy modem sound in their home in years. Likewise, I certainly don't miss the speedy access provided by such devices, or their busy signals, or the "goodbye" sounds of their frequent glitches. But at least twice today, I've been reminded of things they kinda did well.
IM's, for one. The closest equivalent I have for them is the Facebook chat feature, and I rarely use it because of how they've gorked it. The beginning of the end for me was when they morphed their equivalent of a "buddy list" into that grid of teeny profile picture icons that are effectively useless. You can workaround that into having it show a chat list on your right sidebar, but it has to be manually activated each time you access your feed, and it also includes random folks who are not even signed on.
Once you're actually chatting, you run into the dreaded enter-key problem. Any time you hit it to split a paragraph, or mistake it for the ' key, you SEND. Unlike AOL IM'ing (which actually defaulted the opposite way and assumed you didn't want to send unless you hit an onscreen SEND button), there are no options I can find for changing this. So most of the people I chat with are now sharing at least one F-bomb per session with me as I, or they, or usually both of us, screw that up.
Most recently, they've integrated chat into the messaging system, which means that chat sessions never end, and are all recorded in perpetuity. It's kind of distracting when I open a chat window with Julie to see if she can bring Christmas cards to class for me to buy, and I wind up looking at a message about the exact time of a class we had together back in August. There doesn't seem to be any way to change these defaults, either.
Maybe G+ is better at this. Or maybe I just need to put AIM on this machine, assuming there even IS such a thing anymore.
----
The other thing AOL used to do very well is welcome the young while taking meaningful steps to protect them. I thought about this earlier today when seeing this article about how our two other big online behemoths- Apple and Amazon- handle the business of the Utes of America. In short, both make it almost impossible for parents to provide unique iDentities to their kids if they're under 13. As a result, their own desired apps and music purchases can only be made through, and then accessed on, the parents' devices using their own accounts- and the kids thus get access to whatever growner-upper material may be on Mom and/or Dad's machines. If the intent is to protect kids, it clearly isn't working: as one commenter to that article put it:
Don’t forget Spotify either. They currently have no kind of ratings system so imagine what happened when my 8 year old was searching for Cee Lo Green songs…
These cutting-edge trendsetters are either ignoring, or affirmatively avoiding, a simple method used in those dumbass boat-anchor PC's since, what, Windows 98?- the ability to load separate account settings for Mom, Dad or Junior onto the same physical piece of hardware, keeping the latter from getting access to the real words to Camilla the Chicken's song from the Muppets movie. AOL even had a 14.4-baud leg up on these guys back in the mid-90s: you created age-appropriate separate accounts for your kids, letting them advance from child to "young teen" to, finally, full access as they showed ability and trustworthiness at those stages. (Of course some kids got round those limits, but you at least had a fairer shot at letting it happen.)
There's also stuff in that article about how bizarre Kindle is in not letting you share a book among household members, even on the same device: if a Kindle is being shared by a family, but each family member has their own Amazon account? You have to deregister the Kindle from the current account and then reregister it to the new one. Yet another good reason why I've gone with a Droid-based tablet from my Guru rather than the Kindle Fire he was having me consider.
I wonder if it has a built in phone jack for the new AOL 4.0. I hear they have 16-letter screennames now!