JacobRosenberg.net

AOL spent the better part of the last 10 years doing their best to answer every question about the growing influence of the web with “yes, but” answers. We did acquisitions large (Netscape) and small (Navisoft), invested in technologies, and otherwise built a path which ran in parallel to the rest of the web.

There were many different paths. People often speak about the AOL walled garden, but it wasn’t just a wall that kept people out. The garden wasn’t even of the same earth as the rest of the web. Proprietary technology and systems combined with a custom clients provided a universe that was totally alien to the rest of the web.

For years, we built and maintained those systems, which enjoyed a substantial technical head start over the Web technology evolving at would-be competitors like Yahoo. Still, AOL fielded hundreds of developers on their custom platform, while thousands of people at companies all over the world evolved the state of the art in web technology: sooner or later they would catch up.

The day probably came sometime before AOL acquired Netscape in November of 1998, but wasn’t acknowledged until much later. In fact, the defining moment where AOL decided to tear down the wall and move content out of FDO occured as part of a program called Big Bowl. Over the course of 2003 and 2004, starting with the News Channel, AOL migrated their content from legacy - but reliable - systems into web technology.

The platform of choice was AOLserver, an Open Source web server acquired with the purchase of Navisoft. A platform was created using this system which launched Digital City. In 2001, that platform extended to Mapquest and AIM Today, and in 2002 was extended to Netscape.com.

As channels began to migrate to this new platform, AOLserver hit the big time. The group working on this unified platform swelled in size, and began to take on other work as well. Some of these migrations went smoothly, but others showed signs of growing pains. Many from the legacy system complained that web technology was inefficient and inferior to the older systems. Still, the pace of migration continued, driven largely by the ability to put more and higher value ads on pages that were web than pages which were FDO.

The jewel in the crown, of course, was AOL.com. Several efforts were made to redesign this page, including the My AOL Startpage product. This was a flash-based personalized site launched during 2004 on ADP. While some users liked the flexible UI and neat features, it suffered on narrowband connections, had usability and accessibility challenges, and was generally considered a failure.

The next attempt on AOL.com was even bigger — in addition to doing a new portal in 2005, we were going to make AOL content available via a free portal. This was something which had been hotly debated for years, but seemed to be happening for-real this time.

The crux of the plan involved a new top-level portal with Yahoo-like features combined with open and accessible content from all the channels converted during the Big Bowl process. There would also be new free features, such as AIM Mail, a free clone of the AOL Webmail product which was popular with AOL.com users.

The new AOL.com launched over several months in the summer of 2005. It was considered a success at the time, and received widespread praise. Other releases followed in its wake, including a Video Portal and a social networking site called AIMPages in 2006.

At this time, however, it was clear that the future of the company was the web, and only the web. By mid-2006, it was widely rumored AOL would rush away from Access and dial-up and all that proprietary software which had defined the experience for 20 years. The sleeping giants were beginning to awaken, and that the AOL Web software was not built on our core, trusted technologies angered them.

Over the course of 2006, nearly every single architect of the ADP platform and the successful technologies that made AOL.com Portal a reality have moved on to other things.
Here lies the problem: we are cut off from the safety of a walled garden due to market forces. Yet, when things become rough, we resort to the same technologies which kept us behind those walls for so many years. Amazing things have been done with web technology over the last few years — heck, YouTube built a $1.6 billion business out of things you could learn in the Web Development section of a Barnes and Noble.

The future is the web, and the web is open. Is there a place for proprietary systems? Of course - many of the market leaders keep their lead (Google) by having secret sauce that goes beyond that can be found on the shelf. At the core of their excellence, however, is a spirit which embraces the potential of the web as a good thing. Until we’re able to set aside our sentimentality for the ways of the past, and truly embrace the future, we will fall short in what we hope to achieve.

I’m ready for the future — how about you?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 7:07 pm and is filed under History, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.