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AOL brings new meaning to “dot com”s

November 25, 2009 By: Heather Billings Category: Multimedia

Think AOL, and you probably think of that famous phrase (and cheesy ‘90s romance movie), “You’ve got mail.”

I myself remember my family getting innumerable AOL CDs in the mail. But then, I also remember when Alta Vista and Lycos were important search engines and when Netscape Navigator was nipping at IE’s heels in the browser race.

And that’s about the last time I remember taking AOL seriously, too.
But AOL is trying to pull itself out of the ‘90s. Having recently split from Time Warner, AOL is eager to let people know it’s with it, or happening, or whatever it is the cool kids say these days.

It wants to do all this with a single dot.

AOL will become Aol. in December. Yes, Aol. The period is crucial, despite the fact that “America on-line” is not a sentence.

The New York Times spoke to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who is quite enamored of his period. (Now that’s what I call gender equality.)

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

Personally, I think Yahoo! did the whole punctuation thing to death already.

Gone will be the triangular logo that has long been the symbol of slow internet, HTML-incapable e-mail and a hundred obnoxious smileys.

Instead, “Aol.” appears emblazoned across various images deemed relevant to today’s society – such as a goldfish. Or a View-Master.

This is the work of the same advertising group that developed (Product)Red to raise money for AIDS research in Africa. Journalism? I’m in the wrong business. I should get paid millions of dollars for putting extra punctuation in things.

I wonder if fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin will seek to sue AOL for infringement. Before the internet even was, she wrote about a magical place called “the Forest of Aol.” Just try to read that without pronouncing the forest’s name “A-O-L.” I’d say her work has been forever changed by branding.

The irony is that AOL itself may be less changed by its rebranding than Le Guin’s novels are. It’s hard to know if this image shift bring users back to AOL. AOL (and Yahoo, according to Jeff Jarvis, who just wrote about AOL’s decision) used to be about community. Facebook, Flickr and dozens of other sites have since encroached upon that territory, doing “community” better than AOL did. More than the rebranding, I’m curious to see how AOL redefines itself – if it does at all. According to the ad agency’s creative director, Jordan Crane, AOL wants to be “a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff, simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.”

It will be interesting to watch what the company ultimately touts as its strength. “Elegant crazy engaging stuff” sounds more like BoingBoing than anything else.

I can’t think of anything (short of BoingBoingishness) that would draw me to AOL at this point. It and its users* have been the butt of my jokes for far too long for that. I am rather proud to be one of the critics that AOL Chief of Staff Maureen Marquess refers to as “the snarkies.”

*Apologies to those of you who do not spell as if you were an LOLcat.

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