4 ms·

If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no tricker

If I'm honest, I kinda miss the AOL all in one approach. Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Easy to use, no trickery, no figuring out what sites or apps to use, as everyone else(generally) was on AOL. I wonder if an idea like that would work again - was just ahead of its time?

icedchai 3y ago
Yahoo was also like this for a while. Remember Yahoo chat? games? personals?
- silisili 3y ago
  Yahoo had a lot of the same features, but never did it as cleanly as AOL. Perhaps because AOL provided an actual native client whereas I believe Yahoo was always just web based, which marred the experience quite a bit. I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.
  - qw 3y ago
    Yahoo Messenger was available as a Windows program. If they had focused more on chat and video calls, we might be using it now instead of Slack and Teams
    - hulitu 3y ago
      Yahoo Messenger was a very good chat program. Too bad it's gone.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      Same with AOL Instant Messenger. At early startups, we coordinated all our “ops” work in private AOL chat rooms. AOL or Yahoo could’ve built Slack in 1999.
- ohdannyboy 3y ago
  Yahoo pool was awesome. Being paired with a random player... a/s/l?
Waterluvian 3y ago
What, like google.com ?
- w-ll 3y ago
  What, like Yahoo.com?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    "Hey, Siri. Ask Jeeves what this yahoo dot com thing is"
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      "Playing Praise Jesus by the Country Yahoos on Apple Music."
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > Siri > Jeeves > Yahoo This is one of the main reasons why voice control looks great in Star Trek, but sucks in the real world. I want to be able to say, "computer, ${do something}", but with real voice assistants, I have to say "${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to ${do something} on ${brand 3}".
- js2 3y ago
  More generically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
- silisili 3y ago
  There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one. What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks. Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application. Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.
ronsor 3y ago
That idea is alive in well in China as WeChat. We really don't want or need something like that in the West, even in spite of Musk's attempts to recreate it.
jj999 3y ago
> Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Yahoo tried to be that, too. Both are now mostly of historical interest.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
killjoywashere 3y ago
Like, a smartphone?
- silisili 3y ago
  A smartphone would be near the opposite of that. Having to figure out what app others are using and install, and keep switching between them. With AOL if you wanted to contact someone, it was just IM(AIM), for example.
  - gumby271 3y ago
    So more like recent trends of Apple and iOS specifically then? Where Apple first party apps are the go to option and the very thought of having to install a separate app is enough to keep people using the Apple solution. Sure there's an option to install other apps, but increasingly the trend is to use the stock apps for everything. Sure AOL didn't give you a choice, but maybe we'll see that one day with iOS too.
lmm 3y ago
Yahoo was great for that. But apparently it wasn't popular enough (except in Japan).
- vunderba 3y ago
  It's still used as a fairly popular portal in Taiwan as well. https://tw.yahoo.com https://tw.yahoo.com
bobsmooth 3y ago
It's still there if you want it www.msn.com
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
I feel like that everything big online has been an iteration of that same idea for the last 2 decades
bee_rider 3y ago
I think this is what WeChat sort of is? And what Musk wants Twitter/X to become. IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”
rtpg 3y ago
There's some variations of that (like MSN), but I gotta say having messaging tied to a paid service makes me feel a lot more comfortable with using it. I am paying for this! This is how the service works! No weird angles to it
paulddraper 3y ago
Yahoo MSN
CalRobert 3y ago
I grew up on Prodigy but I kind of miss it too. It was smaller then the internet but at the time (perhaps because it was new) it _felt_ bigger.
hattmall 3y ago
Yeah I was just thinking that there should be a service that's like aol, with all the buttons and features just together. Like Google basically has it but it's not all really tied together. The reality is that computing simply used to be a lot cooler.

icedchai 3y ago

Yahoo was also like this for a while. Remember Yahoo chat? games? personals?

silisili 3y ago
Yahoo had a lot of the same features, but never did it as cleanly as AOL. Perhaps because AOL provided an actual native client whereas I believe Yahoo was always just web based, which marred the experience quite a bit. I guess the ultimate takeaway is that there's not a lot of money to be made if they're all gone now.
- qw 3y ago
  Yahoo Messenger was available as a Windows program. If they had focused more on chat and video calls, we might be using it now instead of Slack and Teams
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Yahoo Messenger was a very good chat program. Too bad it's gone.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Same with AOL Instant Messenger. At early startups, we coordinated all our “ops” work in private AOL chat rooms. AOL or Yahoo could’ve built Slack in 1999.
ohdannyboy 3y ago
Yahoo pool was awesome. Being paired with a random player... a/s/l?

Waterluvian 3y ago

What, like google.com ?

w-ll 3y ago
What, like Yahoo.com?
- function_seven 3y ago
  "Hey, Siri. Ask Jeeves what this yahoo dot com thing is"
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    "Playing Praise Jesus by the Country Yahoos on Apple Music."
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Siri > Jeeves > Yahoo This is one of the main reasons why voice control looks great in Star Trek, but sucks in the real world. I want to be able to say, "computer, ${do something}", but with real voice assistants, I have to say "${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to ${do something} on ${brand 3}".
js2 3y ago
More generically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
silisili 3y ago
There's a lot of these comparisons, and I wouldn't want to reply to all of them, but will on this one. What's missing on most of these are the social aspect. With Google, you can't just drop into a 'miamidolphins' chat room to discuss the Dolphins. Nor can you instant message folks. Think of what you'd need to recreate all of it with what we have today. Discord for chat rooms. Whatsapp for IMs. Chrome for browsing. Outlook for email. Steam for games? And there's many more features missing still. All in one application. Further, part of the 'magic' to me was that the application itself was native and static. So you always had your menu bar to click between. And each clicked thing was its own subwindow. Like an OS inside an OS, if you will. Sounds wacky, but I loved the experience...at least at the time.

ronsor 3y ago

That idea is alive in well in China as WeChat. We really don't want or need something like that in the West, even in spite of Musk's attempts to recreate it.

jj999 3y ago

> Email, news, stocks, chats, IMs, web search, all just there front and center. Yahoo tried to be that, too. Both are now mostly of historical interest.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

killjoywashere 3y ago

Like, a smartphone?

silisili 3y ago
A smartphone would be near the opposite of that. Having to figure out what app others are using and install, and keep switching between them. With AOL if you wanted to contact someone, it was just IM(AIM), for example.
- gumby271 3y ago
  So more like recent trends of Apple and iOS specifically then? Where Apple first party apps are the go to option and the very thought of having to install a separate app is enough to keep people using the Apple solution. Sure there's an option to install other apps, but increasingly the trend is to use the stock apps for everything. Sure AOL didn't give you a choice, but maybe we'll see that one day with iOS too.

lmm 3y ago

Yahoo was great for that. But apparently it wasn't popular enough (except in Japan).

vunderba 3y ago
It's still used as a fairly popular portal in Taiwan as well. https://tw.yahoo.com https://tw.yahoo.com

bobsmooth 3y ago

It's still there if you want it www.msn.com

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

I feel like that everything big online has been an iteration of that same idea for the last 2 decades

bee_rider 3y ago

I think this is what WeChat sort of is? And what Musk wants Twitter/X to become. IMO interoperability and standards work better than this sort of all-in-one package. Do one thing, do it well, and play nice with others. Let the best app win. You know the team working on “X news” or whatever is going to be phoning it in, thinking in the back of their heads “we’d really have to do a bad job to get somebody to leave the whole platform.”

rtpg 3y ago

There's some variations of that (like MSN), but I gotta say having messaging tied to a paid service makes me feel a lot more comfortable with using it. I am paying for this! This is how the service works! No weird angles to it

paulddraper 3y ago

Yahoo MSN

CalRobert 3y ago

I grew up on Prodigy but I kind of miss it too. It was smaller then the internet but at the time (perhaps because it was new) it _felt_ bigger.

hattmall 3y ago

Yeah I was just thinking that there should be a service that's like aol, with all the buttons and features just together. Like Google basically has it but it's not all really tied together. The reality is that computing simply used to be a lot cooler.