AOL Journals

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

~ the obituary ~

AOL announced its blogging service on 13 July 2003 and shipped it that August. The name was the first decision worth recording: AOL had surveyed its members, found that the word blog meant nothing coherent to most of them, and called the product Journals to avoid it. Twenty-three years later that reads as either cowardice or unusually accurate market research, depending on how you feel about the word.

Every AOL subscriber got one. There was a template on the web with an RSS 2.0 feed on every journal, and posting hooks wired into the parts of AOL that members were already sitting inside. Later the service was opened up free through AIM.com so you did not need to be paying AOL to have one, which is the point at which it stopped being purely a retention product.

Retention was what it was for at the start. John Scalzi, who ran the community side of it for four and a half years, described it plainly afterward as a maneuver to stop members leaving for LiveJournal or Blogger. It worked on the people it worked on. AOL Journals had a small, committed population who knew each other and had been posting to the same neighbors for years.

Small was the problem. AOL began putting advertising on member journals partway through the run, and once ad revenue was the business rather than subscriptions, a platform whose audience was measured against LiveJournal's had no case to make for itself. AOL announced on 1 October 2008 that Journals and AOL Hometown would both be gone by the end of the month.

~ the case file ~

~ posting by telephone ~

The feature nobody expected in 2003 was voice. If you subscribed to AOL by Phone you could call in, leave a message, and have it posted to your journal as an MP3 attached to an entry. That is audio blogging shipped by a mass-market ISP two years before the word podcast was in general use, aimed at people who would never have installed recording software.

You could also post from AIM, which mattered more day to day. AOL's genuine advantage was that its members were already inside one application all evening, and Journals was built to accept a post from wherever in that application you happened to be.

~ where the reach stopped ~

AOL sold access, and it sold it in North America. Turkey had TTNet and a handful of local providers, and none of that world touched anything with AOL's name on it. Journals was a benefit of a subscription that was not available here, and by the time it opened up free through AIM.com in the mid-2000s the interesting blogging had long since moved to platforms with no ISP attached at all.

~ the exporter ~

What AOL did on the way out was better than the average shutdown of that decade. Rather than handing people a zip file, it worked with Google, which held a stake in AOL at the time, and Blogger built an importer that would carry a journal across with its posts and its comments intact. The tool went live on 7 October 2008, three weeks before the lights went off.

Scalzi's assessment of it was that the migration would work and the community would not survive the move, because a neighborhood does not port. He was writing about a few thousand people who had been reading each other daily for five years and were about to be scattered across the general web with their archives technically preserved.

The wider context was AOL buying its way into a newer answer. Bebo had cost $850 million in May 2008 and Socialthing followed in August, and the People Networks unit those built was where the company's community strategy now lived. Journals and Hometown were the previous generation of the same idea, still running, still costing money, and no longer anybody's plan.

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