INNOBLOG

VS.


Back when I was young, AOL was all the rage. Everyone wanted to get online, get an email address, and most importantly, instant message their friends. IM became a massive success among young people because it made teenage communication easier and, consequently, less awkward. Compared to the telephone, IM required less effort to stay in touch with buddies (and certainly less guts to flirt with potential love interests). It created a new form of communication that then expanded into limited text-only user profiles and away messages. A witty one-liner about how much homework you had or a pithy quote in your profile signaled serious schoolyard status.

The strange power of these features became apparent to me when I got to college, where I used IM to stay in touch with my now-dispersed high school friends and my roommate used it to obsessively check his friends and acquaintances away messages and profiles. Frequently online, often insecure, and always looking to procrastinate, college kids spent a lot of time fine tuning their digital images and keeping track of everyone elses.

If only AOL had paid attention to what their consumers were actually consuming.

The misuse of a product is often a good sign of an unfulfilled need and, therefore, a disruptive opportunity. When MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook stepped in with good-enough functionality that allowed users more control over their profiles, more features to customize, and more ways to interact with their social networks, young people fled AOL en masse. In the 33 months since its launch, MySpace has amassed 77 million users and generates 19 billion page views per month.

Now, years too late, AOL is finally getting into the social networking game with the impending launch of AIM Pages, a service that allows users of AIM to create profile web pages where they can post pictures, blog, and communicate with a network of friends. Meanwhile, MySpace has just announced its official entry into IM. Existing features like in-site messages, comments and bulletin boards have already begun to replace conventional email accounts and instant messaging services for many MySpacers; the deployment of a formal IM interface is likely to draw more and more of its massive base further inside its web-within-the-web.

Unsurprisingly, MySpace has a clear advantage in this virtual turf war: not only is MySpace perceived to be cooler than so-five-years-ago AOL, it is far easier for a consumer to migrate from one IM service to another (thanks, especially, to IM integrators like Trillian) than it is to migrate an entire byzantine network of friends, photos, and blog posts to a new social networking site. Perhaps AIM pages will help AOL stop the bleeding, but IM will advance MySpace's efforts to tap into its massive and entrenched user base to grow page views, continuing its disruptive march.