AOL Hometown

» see hometown.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

aol hometown opened in october 1998 as part of aol's broader push to give its subscriber base reasons to stay inside the walled garden. the offer was straightforward. aol members got space on aol's servers, plus two point-and-click web builders called "1-2-3 publish" and "easy designer". neither tool required html. you could put up a page about your dog or your church group without learning a markup language.

by 2001 aol claimed eleven million hosted pages on hometown. by 2002 the number had climbed to around fourteen million, with a new page added every eight seconds at peak. the service had also absorbed legacy hosting from companies aol had bought along the way, including netscape's user-page directory. aol hometown was effectively the second-largest free web host on the english-speaking internet during the early 2000s, only behind geocities.

i never had an aol account. aol's dial-up gateway was a north american phenomenon, and the cd-mailer flood that defined aol's marketing did not reach turkey at the same scale. my home connection through the late 1990s ran on ttnet over a 33.6k modem, then a 56k modem, with no aol involvement. my own free hosting from that era lived on geocities and mygale. aol hometown was a parallel layer of the same internet i was reading about but not signing into.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

aol hometown was structured around the subscriber's aol screen name. you got a subdomain like members.aol.com/yourname and could fill it with one of the visual templates. a lot of pages used the same template furniture: animated welcome banners and midi loops, with hit counters spinning underneath. the look was already a few years older than equivalent geocities pages, partly because aol's tooling baked in design defaults that aged badly. hometown pages looked obviously like aol pages, and that was sometimes the point and sometimes a problem.

~ how it actually ended ~

on october 31, 2008 aol shut hometown down. the announced reason was that aol was transitioning to focus on its core media properties, which translated to time warner cutting infrastructure costs that did not have clear advertising revenue attached. millions of pages were deleted at the same time. some files remained briefly accessible after the deadline through cached urls, but most of the data was simply gone within days. the deletion was massive enough that it became one of the events pushing jason scott to formally organize the archive team, the volunteer group that would try to mirror geocities one year later when yahoo announced that closure too.

~ what came after ~

the loss left a gap in early-web archeology more than a gap in current internet usage. by 2008 aol hometown's user base had been trending down for years. the active social layer of the english-speaking web had moved to facebook and myspace, and the last people still updating their hometown pages were largely older subscribers using aol's dial-up product into the broadband era. what got buried in the october 2008 deletion was less a living community and more an archive of how the english-speaking web had looked for non-technical users between 1998 and 2003. the geocities deletion in 2009 took the larger chunk of the same era. aol hometown took the smaller chunk first.

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