Did you subscribe to the Industry Standard? Expect to start seeing AOL CDs in the mail, thanks to them buying up the subscriber lists at the Standard's firesale yesterday.
posted by mathowie on Sep 25, 2001 - 12 comments

AOL may buy AT&T broadband in a deal that could allow them to own the browser, net access, data pipes, and content for a vast majority of internet usage and users. How far will AOL/TW go to control any and all forms of media? Are hearings to break the company up far off?
posted by mathowie on Sep 10, 2001 - 14 comments

Teenpeople.com premiering a new Sisqo single (press release too) seems like another example of media conglomerate cross-marketing. You can hear an entire song from a new album 2 months before release on a single website, before even radio or MTV gets it, but why is one corporation using another for an exclusive distribution channel? Are things like this and Madonna selling tickets exclusively through AOL going to remain experimental in nature or is it the face of things to come?
posted by mathowie on May 16, 2001 - 10 comments

We all knew eventually TimeWarner would exert some pressure on AOL for owning/running winamp.com as a portal to steal TimeWarner artists' work. Yesterday, winamp took down their search engine (here's the current result for all searches). Is this just the first step by TimeWarner? How long will winamp continue to last?
posted by mathowie on Aug 11, 2000 - 2 comments

Today's Davenetics (it's a newsletter) noticed a flurry of wireless deals came about today. AOL is planning mobile versions of instant messenger, email, and other AOL services, Microsoft is working on mobile MSN and Hotmail, while Amazon has unveiled their phone portal to shopping. Looks like we will soon be reminiscing about the good old days when the internet used silly wires and cables.
posted by mathowie on Feb 28, 2000 - 1 comment

Mars, the next version of MSN, is just around the corner. It's obviously an AOL clone, giving new users a view of the internet filtered for ease of use. My opinion of it is split. On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with making a useful, straight-forward interface that anyone can use. In fact that's a holy grail for UI designers. But the interface is a bit much, taking up over a third of the screen real estate, and it will no doubt funnel users into all of the MSN websites. Will MSN users know the rest of the internet is out there?
posted by mathowie on Feb 27, 2000 - 3 comments

AOL jumps on the get-rich-quick bandwagon. "Every time you generate a new member for AOL who stays for 90 days, AOL will pay you $15. Imagine how much extra cash you could make! Make $20,000, $40,000, $80,000, $100,000 - the sky is the limit!" Wow, it almost sounds easier than working...
posted by mathowie on Feb 14, 2000 - 1 comment

MovieFone (or 777film.com, or AOL/Moviefone if you want to be official) has long been my favorite place to look up movie showtimes, but lately I've been running into problems. The biggest one is this: if you search for movies by theater, then hit "more" a couple times, it reaches a limit of about 12 theaters. Here in LA, that limit corresponds to a 4-5 mile radius. The theater I want to look up movie times at is maybe 7-8 miles away, but no where in the interface is a real "search." It's all just lists and lists. Eventually, I found a list of local theaters (covering about a 20 mile radius) in the theater codes section, but it's not a real search engine, so looking up times at out of town theaters requires you to know the zip code of the place you're going to. I know they're trying to simplify their site by taking out a search engine, but what about the people that know exactly what they want? I use moviefone on the web because using it on a telephone requires you to navigate convoluted menu systems, but they've transferred the phone experience to the web quite well.
posted by mathowie on Jan 16, 2000 - 2 comments

Salon is running a great article about the AOL/TimeWarner merger that brings up plenty of issues we should all be concerned about. I can't remember the last time a company merger affected so many. This deal touches everyone, from what my grandparents watch on TV at night to what I'll be allowed to see on my RoadRunner cable modem. Just thinking of how they're going to control TV, movies, music, news, and the internet sends chills up and down my spine.
posted by mathowie on Jan 10, 2000 - 0 comments

I've pointed to fark.com before, because I find it one of the more amusing weblogs. While I was searching for pointers to MetaFilter today, I noticed they have their referer logs in a public folder. What's great about it is seeing the search terms used on AOL's search engine. There's a few gems like "pokemon porn," "catholic girls playing in the mud," and "how to fake your own death." I see similar AOL searches in MetaFilter's logs. AOL is used by some freaky people.
posted by mathowie on Dec 3, 1999 - 2 comments

Dontcha hate it when something like Winamp gets bought out by AOL? It crashes a bit too much on my home system so I went looking for alternatives and was glad when I found FreeAMP (it's GPL'ed to boot!). Take the high road, use the mp3 player that guarantees no AOL buyouts on your desktop.
posted by mathowie on Sep 23, 1999 - 0 comments

On a nearly daily basis, new billionaires are made in stock swaps and mergers. Today it's Earthlink and Mindspring becoming one. Suddenly a couple of minor leage national ISPs might be powerful enough to take on AOL. I just hope I don't have to hear Sky Dayton's radio commercials anymore...
posted by mathowie on Sep 23, 1999 - 0 comments

AOL and Microsoft are resorting to playground antics. I downloaded the new MS messenger when it came out last Thursday, and I've already gotten three patches for it, each time it works with AOL users for just a few hours. I wonder how long they'll continue the dueling banjos thing.
posted by mathowie on Jul 26, 1999 - 1 comment

Hello AOL? It's Microsoft, we've come to crush your Instant Messenger.
posted by mathowie on Jul 22, 1999 - 0 comments