October 27, 2000

10:45 AM

AOL's walled garden.Anyone who doesnt think that AOL will only link to AOL/Time Warner properties in the broadband future is fooling themselves.
posted by owillis (3 comments total)

From the article:

According to AOL, removing the home page icon was a way to make the service simpler for subscribers without limiting their preferences.

Huh?

Since when is the "home page" button so complicated? And I'm with you on this one, owillis, the article states that yeah, you could change your default home page, but yeah, it's tough to do so.

So we see AOL's version of "simplicity".

Feh.
posted by ethmar at 11:08 AM on October 27, 2000

I am sure that AOL will link to Metafilter if we pool together and raise $10 million dollars to do so...
posted by Brilliantcrank at 8:53 PM on October 27, 2000

Keeping in mind that this applies only to the AOLized browser that you get to by using the address bar right in the AOL software, and opens button-less IE windows as if they were part of AOL itself.

But they haven't removed the Favorites, and you can still type any address you want. Or, as I'm doing right now, run IE from an outside-AOL shortcut and use its full features.

But AOL can't shut off the internet. The full value of AOL depends on full access to everything. This is what they were being told for years back in the early 90s, and finally woke up to.
posted by dhartung at 8:24 PM on October 28, 2000