ThinkingSkull.com

AOL, previously America Online, was once THE original place for freaks and geeks to meet. Ravenous teen and young adults quickly became addicted to AOL’s mass-marketting of hundreds of thousands of free-trial disks, many of which became the target of jokes once the rush was over. But for all the newness of a gigantic interactive online community, self-imposed restrictions slowly chased away the audience as AOL was pressured to police itself.

Free-form upstarts such as Friendster networked buddies to buddies and provided revenue from advertising, but it wasn’t until the explosive growth of MySpace.com (and very public sale) that anyone really took notice. For the first time since AOL opened its doors, there was another “free” place that people could join, express themselves, then link up with friends and buddies all over the ‘net. And now, just like AOL before it, it has become so popular that self-policing has been called into question, as has pornography and other not-so-friendly content (and in some cases, users themselves).

For the last year or so, AOL has positioned itself onto the web no longer as a “gated community” with exclusive content, but open access inclusing free email and other features (with premium features for paying customers). But now rumors are surfacing of a so-called “MySpace Killer” that might combine AOL’s ability to serve tens of millions of customers with the free-form expression MySpace users crave, and it’s said to be coming soon. More interesting are the slowdowns and outages reported from MySpace users as well, including the moan that if there was anything better, they’d jump to it in an instant.

Will AOL again become the cool/hip/chic place to be, or is it all a bunch of hooey?