Posted 11/19/09 at 11:45:38 AM by Paul Lilly

Today's WTF moment is brought to you by AOL. The struggling ISP recently told investors it would spend $200 million trimming down a large portion of its staff, but up until now, the suits in charge didn't say how they planned to do it. According to CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL is looking for "up to 2,500 volunteers," CNet reports.

Raising your hand for a pink slip doesn't quite have the same effect as barging into the boss man's office and telling him to to 'take this job and shove it,' so we're curious how AOL's volunteer program plays out.

The 'step forward and enjoy the holidays on unemployment' program begins on December 4, just a few days before AOL spins off from Time Warner. So in other words, AOL employees must choose whether to leave on their own free will and start the job hunt right away, or roll the dice and hope they won't end up with a pink slip anyway as AOL moves to cut its annual operating expenses by $300 million. Sounds about as much fun as Russian Roulette, but hey, at least the investors are happy.

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Posted 11/10/09 at 07:21:26 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Things aren’t looking great for AOL as it is in the process of shaking Time Warner loose. The once dominant internet company has announced that 100 layoffs will be happening soon. After that AOL plans to ask for voluntary departures, possibly with some sort of buyout system. If that doesn’t produce the desired results, employees can expect heads to roll.

In an earnings call last week, Time Warner reported that AOL revenues were down 23 percent from last year. Sources say that those figures mean AOL will need to cut about 1000 jobs through various means. The larger layoffs could coincide with AOL’s departure from Time Warner. It will be a rough holiday season for some AOL employees. It almost makes you miss the golden age of the free AOL disk.

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Posted 10/27/09 at 12:00:00 AM by Paul Lilly

David Liu, a longtime exec at AOL and vice president in charge of Global Messaging, will make his exit from the company next month, according to an email. His departure comes just one month after the hiring of ex-Yahoo Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and Mobile Communications.

Liu, who was in charge of overseeing AOL's AIM, ICQ, and more recent Lifestream social aggregator, said he was leaving to "pursue outside opportunities," but his desire to suddenly look elsewhere was most likely fueled when AOL decided to go in a different direction with Grarlinghouse.

So what's next for Liu? According to TechCrunch, Liu has a few things going on, including becoming an angel investor in startup SimpleGeo, as well as talking to private equity firms about joining as a partner in search of realtime startups. And considering Liu's history (earlier in the decade he launched and grew AOL.com's free portal to 50 million users), he shouldn't have too much trouble setting up meetings with investors.

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Posted 10/13/09 at 07:23:15 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Internet was just beginning to find a mainstream audience in 1994. It could be said that the introduction of Netscape Navigator on October 13th of that year had a lot to do with increasing internet adoption. Netscape was a huge leap forward, easily leapfrogging other graphical browsers. It supported colored backgrounds, text styling, JavaScript, and media embedding. In many ways, it was the first modern web browser.

By 1996, Netscape had captured 80% market share. Development was rapid, seeing the incorporation of CSS and table layout features as time passed. Microsoft put out the first version of Internet Explorer a year after Netscape, but found little success.

The good times couldn’t last forever, though. Microsoft released IE 4 in 1998. Thanks to some advanced features, IE captured the number one spot in only 12 months. A series of poor decisions left the Netscape browser in the hands of AOL, and we all know how that went. Development slowed, and the once great browser languished. Support was finally completely dropped in 2008.

Amid all the dark times, one great thing did happen with Netscape. The browser code was open-sourced in February 1998. It wouldn’t become apparent until years later how well that worked out for the web. From Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation built Firefox. Many feel that the Firefox browser is the best available, and it enjoys a healthy 27% market share. Let’s all have a moment of silence to remember Netscape on, this, its 15th birthday. Was Netscape your first browser? Any fond memories of those dial-up days?

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Posted 09/08/09 at 06:04:14 PM by Jason Barry

AOL has begun integrating its popular instant messaging service with two other social networking moguls: Facebook and Twitter.  In July, they released a beta version of the AIM Client that connected the services to the application.  With the updated beta version you were able to view friends’ status updates from Facebook and tweets from Twitter.

In a more recent update to the beta client, AIM now also gives you the power to update your Facebook status, as well as tweet from your Twitter account, all from within the AIM client.  The updated “Lifestream” section of the application also features integration into other popular networking tools such as Flickr and YouTube.

A seemingly smart move by AOL, they’ve moved past their competitors, Yahoo Messenger and Live Messenger, by providing these additional, and in some cases, exclusive features.

Find more information about the AIM beta client and download a copy yourself here.

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Posted 08/18/09 at 05:42:29 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Gmail shed its beta tag in July, after having been around for five years. However, Gmail has acquired a different tag now: that of the third most popular webmail service in the US, at least according to internet research firm comScore. Gmail leapt past AOL to take the third spot during the month of July, a month in which it entertained 37 million unique visitors as opposed to 36.4 million users that visited AOL.

It now has Windows Live Hotmail – currently second with 47 million monthly unique visitors – well within its reach. Gmail’s unique visitors swelled by 25% during the first 7 months of 2009, while Hotmail only managed to increase unique visitors by 8%. Yahoo Mail is the most popular webmail service with 106 million unique visitors.

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Posted 07/07/09 at 02:12:33 PM by Paul Lilly

Most of you probably remember CompuServe as a popular online service from the late 1990s, but the company has been around since 1979, and even earlier prior to a name change. It was also the first online service to offer real-time chat online, and it did it way back in 1980. Now, after thirty years, CompuServe is closing its doors.

"Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s," said Davide Goldes, an early CompuServe users who is now president and senior analyst at Basex.

AOL, who bought the company in 1997, is urging the few remaining CompuServe Classic customers to move on to the company's sub-brand ISP, CompuServe 2000.

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Posted 05/03/09 at 12:26:26 AM by Justin Kerr

Business schools around the world often study the January 2000 merger of Time Warner & AOL under the headline “Worst Mergers In American Corporate History”. It is not unusual, or unnatural for content creation companies to enter the distribution market, but AOL and magazine publishing arm Time Inc. have dogged their parent companies earnings for years now. Looking to cut its losses, Time Warner announced on Wednesday that it was close to spinning off America Online, an acquisition that has cost the company more than $100 billion in shareholder value.

According to the filing; “Although the company’s board of directors has not made any decision, the company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions.” When asked about the future of Time Warner, CEO Jeffery L. Bewkes claims the future “may well include publishing” but made it clear that this could change at any time. The company is likely holding out on making any decisions about Time Inc. until the recession eases and it can see if weakening print sales are a result of the recession, or the shift of its readers to online mediums.

Time Warner has already spun off it's cable division, and is clearly looking to focus on content creation, rather than delivery. I also can't help but wonder whether or not an independent AOL would become an acquisition target for Microsoft. The ad network was one of the primary drivers behind the Yahoo talks, and this is one area that AOL still does reasonably well in.

Can AOL survive on it's own? Hit the jump and let us know what you think.

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