Back in the day, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was THE way to communicate on the internet. Every young person used it, whether they were in junior high, high school, or college, and they’d be on it for hours. This is where the original emoticons were created. Abbreviations like “brb” (be right back), “ttyl” (talk to you later), “gtg” (got to go), “lol” (laughing out loud), and “omg” (oh my God) were born here. Screen names were sacred (the sharing of which meant you were friends) and the blocking of someone else meant that you weren’t friends anymore. Buddy lists were a list of all your friends and people that you wanted to keep tabs on. The profile page allowed you to display information about yourself and even post links. The “Away Message” allowed you to broadcast your status. Sound anything like an early social network? Facebook maybe?
AOL had the network, the communication platform, and the biggest name in internet access. They were such an established part of our culture that families would get a second line just so that the young users could constantly be online after dialing in. Even after broadband internet became more affordable and widespread, they were still the dominant force for communication and people still had paid-subscriptions to AOL even though they could get onto the internet directly. So why did AIM become irrelevant and Facebook become the dominant force in social networking?
Facebook pursued the areas that AIM users were jury rigging together. Profile pages? AOL could have easily created a larger and more structured medium for users to post information about themselves. Status updates? AOL was only concerned with Away Messages since it meant that users would have to be online to display them. The down side? Users HAD to be online to display them. Pictures? Users would post links to their Webshots account in their profile in order to share out. Surely storage of such collections would have been quite the undertaking and it was difficult to see how that would generate revenue. Yet Webshots did it and the acquisition of such a company would have been a small purchase for the cash-rich AOL. Wall Postings? Users would cut and paste portions of conversations to put in their profile and that would become a mini-wall to post content. AOL could have expanded upon their customers’ needs since they had an extensive set of forums where users could post material and they could be restricted to certain people. Translating that over to “individual forums” where there was one for each person should not have been that big of a leap. So again, with all these established technologies, how did Facebook overtake AIM?
AOL either could not see the opportunities before them or they rested on their laurels thinking that Facebook wouldn’t be able to compete with them and that Facebook would only supplement their users’ needs. They could not see the long-term opportunity that user-data and online time produced when it came to advertising. To be fair, Google was the first large success to show that this worked and it would take a key exec from that company to lead Facebook down the same path. As soon as FB became popular to the point of being a stand-alone reason for users to be on the internet, they started expanding into other areas traditionally provided by other companies, such as Instant Messaging. This, along with Google Chat, has caused some serious problems for AIM. That’s to say nothing about how text messaging today has become the new Instant Message. AOL is now scrambling to catch up and become relevant again.
What’s the moral of the story? You need to stay nimble in the technology world and leverage the position you have already even if you don’t have the idea first. Facebook’s done that to competitors like Foursquare and Google Latitude, so it’s clear that they know where their success has come from.
