AOL Pictures

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

~ the goodbye ~

aol pictures was the kind of thing a household on aol dial-up used. i was not on aol. in turkey in 2000 the consumer accounts were ttnet dial-up and superonline, the aol-flavored "you've got mail" walled-garden model never had a meaningful turkish presence. aol pictures lived inside the aol client and inside the aol web portal, both of which assumed you had an aol screen name and an aol monthly bill. that ruled out almost everybody on a turkish dial-up account by default.

the lineage is older than the pictures.aol.com brand. in 1997 aol and kodak launched you've got pictures, a deal where you dropped off a film roll at a participating kodak photofinisher, ticked a box for digital delivery, and the scans showed up in your aol inbox a few days later as a slideshow. you've got pictures evolved over the next few years into aol pictures, which by the early 2000s was a standalone web service for uploading from a digital camera, organizing albums, sharing with other aol members, and ordering physical prints through the kodak fulfillment backend.

anyway, the peak was probably 2003 to 2006, when digital cameras had crossed into mass consumer adoption and most aol subscribers had not yet moved to flickr or facebook photo uploads. the dial-up subscriber base was already shrinking, the aol portal was steadily losing share, the pictures service rode the same curve down. by july 25 2008 aol announced it was shuttering pictures, xdrive and bluestring as a group to save costs and focus the consumer business on advertising. pictures was fully closed on december 31 2008.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dial-up photo era ~

the late-90s consumer photo flow was a kodak film roll, a one-hour developer, and a stack of glossy four-by-six prints in an envelope. the you've got pictures deal in 1997 was the first major attempt to bridge that flow into the email era. you dropped the film at a participating kodak counter, you paid a small surcharge, and the scans arrived in your aol inbox as a low-resolution slideshow with a link to order more prints. the bandwidth math made the model possible only inside an isp-bundled product, since a 1997 modem could not pull thirty-six full-resolution scans on demand. the aol attachment delivery and the kodak fulfillment back-end did most of the work behind the scenes.

the pictures.aol.com web service was the natural successor once digital cameras took over from film. you uploaded from a memory card through the aol client, you tagged albums by event, you shared links with other aol members, and you could order physical prints through kodak with one click. honestly, the whole thing assumed your social graph was already inside aol, which by 2005 was a shrinking assumption.

~ the july 2008 cleanup ~

the july 25 2008 announcement bundled three aol services into one death notice. xdrive was the online-storage product aol had bought in 2005 for thirty million dollars. bluestring was a slideshow-creation tool aol had acquired the year before. aol pictures was the oldest of the three. all three were closed on december 31 2008 with download windows of a few months for users to pull their files before deletion. the cost-cutting framing was that aol was refocusing on advertising as the core business and exiting the consumer-storage products that did not generate ad revenue.

the aol pictures shutdown was a small story inside a much larger aol unwinding, the time-warner spin-off that became aol inc. was about a year away, the patch and arianna huffington phases of aol were still ahead. the photo archives that survived the 2008 shutdown mostly went to facebook uploads or to flickr through manual export, very few users moved their albums to a successor service. the dial-up household photo album was at that point already mostly on a hard drive at home.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »