AOL makes More Services Free!

So What?

The move marks the end of an era for a company that grew rapidly in the 1990s by making it easy to connect online, giving millions of Americans their first taste of e-mail, the Web and instant messaging through discs that continually arrived unsolicited in mailboxes.

Yeah, and the sudden increase flooded the modems in Virginia into uselessness until AOL installed about a bajillion more.

I’ve never had a need for “instant” messaging. Never wanted it. Have to “turn it off” at the AOL control panel. Heck, I don’t even turn on my (soon to be out moded) cell phone unless I’m going to make a call.

Not only did AOL offer free upgrades via CD disc through every possible venue one can imagine, they would constantly “upgrade” every time you signed off,this would insert the next time one booted, wheather you wanted it or not!

When I say “upgrade”. I mean all kinds of nasty stuff you might not approve of, but agreed to when you clicked the little “I agree, or I’ve wasted the last 15 minuits watching this thing load” box after the TINY PRINT user agreement. You all read and understood the entire user agreement didn’t you?

When AOL v9.0 became the standard I went back to using AOL v.4.0. It was useless in connecting to the news links on AOL’s very own welcome banner, but it didn’t consistantly freeze up. With every “neew and improved” step one takes there are the inevitable “new and improved” patches to fix the holes.

The changes were announced as Time Warner reported a profit Wednesday of $1 billion for the second quarter. Its cable TV business grew thanks to more high-speed Internet and digital phone customers, offsetting weakness at AOL, which saw a 2 percent drop in revenue.

AOL accounts for one-fifth of Time Warner’s revenue, and most of that contribution comes from subscription sales. So the bet here is that advertising can rise fast enough to supplant the declines in subscription revenue – a trend possibly already in action. In the second quarter, AOL’s ad sales rose 40 percent, while subscription revenue dropped 11 percent.

Oh goody! More intrusive ads and cookies.

AOL has about 6.2 million U.S. subscribers who have broadband but pay extra – generally $15 a month – for AOL services, meaning AOL could lose more than $1 billion in annual revenue, on top of what it would have lost anyway from customers dropping dial-up plans.

Um, dial-up accounts (like me) that they lose to….Time Warner? Adelphia? What?

I’d say Time Warner-AOL stock is still fairly safe bet.
In other bad news, Mozilla Firefox users (like me) may notice the manditory
“upgrade” process has begun. These things ALWAYS lead to collateral damage.
Maybe the parents of Firefox aren’t as greedy or foolish. Mbwa ha ha ha haaa!

The one upgrade thing I like is Xhtml.
The geeky stuff.

XHTML, or Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, is the successor to HTML as the W3C (http://www.w3.org) standard language with which all web pages are created. It is often used in conjunction with CSS and JavaScript.
WordPress strives to conform to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard.

One has to pay a bit closer attention, but it clarifies conflicts in writing, especially
things like “un-nesting”, a pitfall I found in one of my early posts here that looked like,………well, it looked like I was new to Wordpress.