Is Facebook Becoming the New AOL?
Remember the days before social media and search engine optimization? When you would hear that glorious noise of your modem dialing and connecting you with AOL. What good times we had in chat rooms debating our favorite sports team, or checking our email through that clunky interface at the breakneck speed of 28k.
Well our connections may be faster and we may believe we are sophisticated social media experts, but have we come full circle to a AOL type way of thinking? You know a way of thinking where you never search on venture onto a site unless you see the link on Facebook.
Do you still send email through a personal email account or do you just use the clunky Facebook interface? Do you have your own instant message program installed on your computer or is it just more convenient to use Facebooks built in instant messenger?
Next thing you know there will be applications inside Facebook or games and quizzes you can play, that keep you stuck in the Facebook environment. Oh wait, there already are. Next thing you know you will hear people saying my Facebook is down.
The thing that makes the internet great and why breaking out of that AOL shell so many years ago was important is it allowed for individual thought and creativity. Now it seems we are being sucked back into a uniform, sterile online world that limits all of that.
Hopefully this will be as short lived as the AOL dominance, but at least in the mean time I don’t get a busy signal every time I try to connect.
