> The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death.
But now things are very different. Instead of just one one AOL silo, we have many different ones. And we're communicating about them and interacting in ways that we weren't before.
The barriers to entry are much lower, and our standards/expectations are higher/different than before.
Aol as a singular silo only lasted so long. Really, there were a few back then too, AIM(and icq)/MSN/Yahoo were probably the biggest and each had a good chunk of users that refused to switch to the others, and each one fell.
I also don't think we've hit AOL 2.0 quite yet, so we still have some time to see how it all works out.
But now things are very different. Instead of just one one AOL silo, we have many different ones. And we're communicating about them and interacting in ways that we weren't before.
The barriers to entry are much lower, and our standards/expectations are higher/different than before.