Re:We are in the AOL days of social networking
by jerf on Thursday January 06, 2011 @06:03PM
(#2077706)
Poking at their marketing material, I'm pretty sure that's only as a dial-up service provider, and maybe some really limited media streaming features that are less subscriber-only rather than licensed by AOL as part of the package but not exclusive.
I was talking about the AOL that fit into the set of Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL, which I tried to make clear but may not have made clear enough. AOL the online service with exclusive forums and custom client software and exclusive games and exclusive this that and the other with incidental access to the internet begrudgingly provided as a second-class citizen is dead, killed by the open internet. A company called AOL survived (with assorted drama), but it's just part of the Internet now.
AOL still has 5 million paid subscribers. Dead is hardly ever truly dead. Facebook in 2020 might still have 500 million users, but the game will be very different.