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April 20, 2006

More Details on AOL’s “MySpace Killer”

Michael Arrington

48 comments »

Ted Leonsis at AOL writes about the recent AOL “MySpace Killer” rumors. Here are the additional details he gives:

Here’s a better way of looking at it. The AIM Buddy List (which was introduced 10 years ago) was the orignial social network, and it has 43 million AIM and Buddy List users. We’re working on adding functionality to AIM that will really open it up — allowing developers, partners, and users to take part. It’s going to be fun. Rather than thinking of it as a killer of anything, let alone MySpace, it will allow our millions of users to express themselves in new and interesting ways and become a catalyst for new communities to grow and flourish. We’ll have more to say about it soon.

I’ve done some digging, though, and it appears that a “MySpace Killer” is exactly what AOL is trying to build. From what I am hearing (and which isn’t contradicted by Ted above), AOL plans on building a social network on the back of AIM, which will pre-populate your AIM friends as your social network friends as well. So the key AIM integration will be to pre-build relationships into the new service.

The service will launch at AIM.com, and individual user pages will be aim.com/[username]. Functionality will be similar to MySpace - with blogging, photo and music widgets available for integration. Also, third party companies are being approached to build widgets (similar to Live.com widgets) that can be integrated into the pages using AOL’s I Am Alpha API.

If anyone out there has a screenshot or two, please send them to me. Anonymously is fine.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Garry Wiseman

    April 20th, 2006 at 6:46 pm

    Utilizing an existing social network to seed a new service is a brilliant idea.

    :-)

  2. Shii

    April 20th, 2006 at 7:01 pm

    Speaking of I Am Alpha, it has an interesting module, “Buddy Gallery”. It seems it would list images of your buddies, or something, but it doesn’t.

    I added it to my little module thing but it was empty. The description said:

    > These buddies are currently ineligible for your Buddy Gallery because they do not currently have an AIM Pages profile.

    What is “AIM Pages”?

  3. Shii

    April 20th, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Hey, wait a minute… this I Am Alpha playground calls itself an “AIM Pages Profile”.

    http://img107.imageshack.us/my.....ges1sz.png

    Do I win a prize?

  4. John

    April 20th, 2006 at 7:15 pm

    I’m not particularly a huge fan of AOL, however this idea is actually a pretty good one. I’m a religious AIM user and it’s how I keep in touch with the vast majority of people I know, so I might be genuinely interested in this ‘MySpace killer.”

  5. ryan

    April 20th, 2006 at 8:01 pm

    AOL should also include ICQ users (AOL owns them), the original, original social network (after BBS and IRC). They would start with a HUGE network in place. I am sure they will take the angle that its more safe than myspace. Not a bad move by aging AOL.

  6. Saul Weiner

    April 20th, 2006 at 8:10 pm

    John, this is just another compartmentalized idea from AOL. It seems they are just trying desparately to hang onto their dwindling base. I can’t imagine how they are going to build a product that’ll make people want to switch to their service. They’ve never done it in the past, after their initial success.

  7. Andrew Fife

    April 20th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    I don’t think that anyone can challenge myspace in the short term because of the investment that all of its users have made in creating their own home pages. However, myspace doesn’t have the over 30 demographic and AOL could possibly win that market based on leveraging their AIM contacts.

  8. Anon

    April 20th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    Genius! If they make it as easy to post to as it is to change your AIM profile, they’re going to be really successful.

  9. Anon

    April 20th, 2006 at 9:30 pm

    @ryan:

    ICQ’s already on the AIM network. Just put in an ICQ number as the “screenname” in AIM and chat away.

  10. Colin Strummer

    April 20th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

    its all a bit boring though…
    SAFE OLD AOL…

  11. Dimitar Vesselinov

    April 21st, 2006 at 4:36 am

    ICQ already has a social network, it’s called ICQ Universe.

    YASNS: ICQ Universe
    http://many.corante.com/archiv.....iverse.php

  12. Todd Zeigler

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:59 am

    Sounds like MSN Spaces, which hasn’t worked that well as far as I can tell despite being tied to Messenger. Although last time I checked MSN Spaces didn’t ahve the friend component.

  13. Dare Obasanjo

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:10 am

    Isn’t this all old news? Marc Canter has been blogging these details for a while in posts like http://blog.broadbandmechanics.....elping-aol and http://blog.broadbandmechanics.....oes-social

    They’re basically doing something similar to what we’ve done with social networking in Windows Live Messenger and MSN Spaces (currently in beta in Australia). I blogged this stuff with screenshots the post at http://www.25hoursaday.com/web.....d92ce6c14f

  14. Jim

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:12 am

    Am I the only person left that appreciates AIM for it’s simplicity and lack of these kind of valueless “features”?

  15. Anon

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:18 am

    @Todd Zeigler

    MSN Spaces is more popular than Google’s Blogger.

  16. oppositionradio

    April 21st, 2006 at 10:22 am

    its pretty damn cool - much better UI than myspace - but still its AOL. i wish newsvine was doing something like this… oh wait… the are!

  17. Ed Kopp

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pm

    While this is a nice attempt by AOL, I think it might be too little, too late. MySpace has a secure hold on many millions of users, especially kids and teens, and unless AOL offers something with at least as many features and ease of use, it won’t have a chance.

  18. Richard Tallent

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pm

    *Yawn* yet another ad-whored, censored, centralized web hosting service that turns people into “content providers” for a “web property.”

    A neutral, democratic Internet will never be achieved as long as common people have no realistic way to run their own web servers.

  19. Jason

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:55 pm

    good luck getting all the teens in the US who use MySpace to switch.

  20. idar

    April 21st, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    but dont’t forget — all those teens on myspace are simultaneously chatting on instant messenger. 16-20something is AIM’s largest demographic.

  21. Anon

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:12 pm

    Good idea by AOL. They are finally doing some cool stuff. Did you see the latest version of Opera 9? It “borrowed” a feature from AOL Explorer (according to Betanews.com). AOL is stepping up here, and will be interesting to watch.

  22. JD

    April 22nd, 2006 at 7:38 am

    Ed Kopp (Comment #23) - You know how kids are. MySpace doesn’t have a secure hold on anything. Haha, and AOL wont have to do much to offer as many features as MySpace. The biggest problem any social networking service is going to have when competing with MySpace is all of MySpace’s users have stability. I think that can be easily overcome though.

    Jason (Comment #25) - Offer features users want and offer them an easy way to migrate to the new service and bring their friends and I think that’ll rip a big leak in MySpace’s userbase. I honestly don’t think MySpace is as unbreakable as most people make them out to be but then again I’m no expert.

  23. pwb

    April 22nd, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Anyone announcing themselves as a “[service] killer” can be wholly dismissed as having little understanding.

  24. Ryan

    May 4th, 2006 at 11:19 am

    I will admit that I find myspace kind of a disgrace to my intelligence, because of all the restrictions it has, AOL will get many many more people if they offer an advanced option for advanced users, maybe even let us use dreamweaver :) but i dont think they will. We will see! Hope they make the right move!

  25. ThatAOLGuy

    May 9th, 2006 at 4:55 am

    I’m an engineer at AOL, which means I’m not supposed to be here. But I’m going to answer some of your questions. Even though I’m doing this anonymously, I’m going to state for the record that I do NOT speak on behalf of AOL.

    14. “I added it to my little module thing but it was empty. The description said:

    > These buddies are currently ineligible for your Buddy Gallery because they do not currently have an AIM Pages profile.”

    This is because the product is not yet available to the public. The only people who have active profiles right now are mostly AOL employees. You also asked, “What is AIM Pages?” AIM Pages is the product being discussed.

    15. “Hey, wait a minute… this I Am Alpha playground calls itself an “AIM Pages Profile”.”

    Bingo. iamalpha.com is the precursor to AIM Pages. That’s not to say that AIM Pages will look like iamalpha; it looks nothing like it (thankfully). iamalpha was put out as the site to get developers started on modules that will be used in AIM Pages.

    35. “Anyone announcing themselves as a “[service] killer” can be wholly dismissed as having little understanding.”

    As far as I know, no one at AOL ever called it that. Someone else called it that, and we (Ted Leonsis) responded, saying that it wasn’t that at all. Yes, it’s a product like MySpace, but no, we’re not looking to kill anything.

    36. “AOL will get many many more people if they offer an advanced option for advanced users, maybe even let us use dreamweaver :) but i dont think they will.”

    Better. You can create active page modules using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including AJAX functionality through an AOL-supplied proxy that gets you around the JS domain sandbox) that do whatever you want them to do. The documentation at iamalpha.com is all about this, although it’s admittedly severely lacking at the moment. Things will become much clearer once the product is out.

    -TAG

  26. Steve L.

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:20 am

    Were do i find some new MS layouts?

    Thanks,
    Steve

  27. Will

    July 23rd, 2006 at 10:14 pm

    AIMpages much like AOL has the worst search features I’ve ever seen. AOL could have survived if it would have allowed users to actually search fields they want correctly. Its amazing how big companies overlook the simpliest most important things. What good are customized profiles if no one can find them…

  28. Cristal

    January 12th, 2007 at 7:41 pm

    hey wats up its cristal is this the will that i know ?

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