Almost 20 years ago, AOL was THE Place To Be. It brought the internet to the masses with millions of CD-ROMs mailed to households over and over again. If you had a home computer, particularly in middle America, there is a good likelihood you had AOL.
People used AOL to connect and reconnect with family and old friends. This was also a way to “meet” people online. Newsgroups, chat rooms, added to the stickiness of the site.
AOL had the advantage of launching just as the Internet began to move from government and academia to mass availability. Other companies, such as Netscape, were there to help AOL users when they were ready to venture beyond the closed walls of the AOL community.
Post-Time Warner acquisition and roll-out, AOL is still operating and navigating to a new business model that makes it relevant today.
Flash forward 20 years. If you look at the demographics and psychographics of today’s Facebook user, in many ways it mirrors those of the AOL user a generation before. I’m not suggesting these are the same exact people, though in some cases they most certainly are, but it is the same kind of people doing similar things. The core of today’s Facebook users are connecting and reconnecting with family and old friends and sharing their thoughts.
Like AOL launching at the right time for its offering, Facebook benefited from launching when broadband and wireless connections throughout the world were finally able to support quicker downloads and video capability.
The irony with Facebook is what many of its users see as a “safe” community, others see as a threat to personal privacy. The amount of personal data being willingly shared is astounding. The difference is that Facebook is without a doubt collecting it. All the ways it might leverage this information still has yet to be seen. The second outstanding question is will its users remain with it a few years down the road to make this data just as valuable then as it is now with over 500 million users.
At this time, Facebook is standing close to where AOL stood a generation earlier. Where it will be 5 or 10 years down the road will ultimately depend on (1) if its users remain as active as they currently are and (2) the value it can show to companies. Its distributed LIKE button is a step to making it more relevant to other websites, but more revenue-generating options will need to be unveiled soon. No doubt, many things are in the works. Which path Facebook takes should be revealed in the not too distant future.
Fork In The Road 