I Have One Question.

Has AOL ever done anything right?  I know It's sort of a given that I will hate about anything AOL will come up with.  But when I look over their history, I see charlatanism, hubris and incompetence.  Today's example of the latter merely adds more to the laundry list of crimes against cyberhumanity.

AOL, for reasons that could only be described as "their own", released copious personal information about their users.  They released the search logs for hundreds of users.  And here's the part that makes it the most incompetent - they made the searches "anonymous" by making the User ID a random number.

As Arrington put it:

The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment.  Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless.

People are calling for a boycott, which is pretty much closing the barn doors after the horse has left.  After nearly destroying Time-Warner, after turning Netscape into a laughing stock, after bilking millions of $20 a month for bad dial-up until the market would support it no more, after making the Internet so "usable" that it was functionally useless, I can only come to the conclusion that AOL is run by a set of highly desperate people who have a company to save and no real creativity to actually save it.

Recently, after operating the Internet's largest gated community for years, population loss has led them to the conclusion that maybe fences don't make better neighbors - but instead make it more difficult to get around.  But it's too little too late.  Most ex-AOL users are as embittered as a divorcee.  They aren't going to go back because it's free. 

No one should be particularly shocked or enraged by today's information release.  We should have seen it coming.

Photo: Ronnie Bergeron

Technorati Tags: AOL, AOL.die.die.die, netscape, time-warner, incompetence, bad management playhouse

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