How AOL is Remaking Themselves

AOL, for many years, was one of the largest ISPs in the United States and the world.  Providing dial-up services to a large amount of people.  Today, though, as the dial-up business is slowly dying off, AOL is taking up a new path: content. 

Yes, you heard me right.  AOL has been building themselves up over the past 2 years to become one of the largest content providers on the internet.  They're shifting themselves from your (hopefully) former ISP to where you get content.  They've been doing this by acquiring different news websites over the past 1-2 years.  Do the websites Engadget, TechCrunch or The Huffington Post ring a bell?  How about about.me - does that ring a bell?  They are all AOL properties.  AOL does still make most of their money on old dial-up subscribers but that business is slowly fading out the door, and once it's gone for good, AOL will still be with us as a content company.

I actually give props to AOL for doing this restructuring of their business, instead of trying to rely on dial-up, they are changing things around and gearing themselves up to be the next big content company.  This is a good direction for AOL, and this new business model will definitely last longer for them.  This reimaging AOL is going through assures that once their dial-up business is completely gone, they will still be with us for long to come, but with a new vision and a improved image.  Let's hope to see what they do next in 2012.

If you have any thoughts about this article, please feel free to comment.

Top Engadget Editors Leave

    Joshua Topolsky (left) Nilay Patel (right)       

Two of the most well known editors in recent years announced Saturday that they will be leaving their respected homes.

Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky, and Managing Editor Nilay Patel announced that they would be leaving Engadget. Certain sources are reporting that Topolsky’s and Patel’s departures have been a long time coming. Also reports have been coming out that Engadget veterans have been receiving issues regarding the tech-based blog. But oddly enough many of these issues have been reported after AOL (owner of Engadget) made a $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Topollsky and Patel did make it official that the leave is not due to issues with AOL, but with interest of doing other projects. Intriguingly enough the Huffington Post tried to convince Topollsky to stay but that “he had already mentally made up his mind to go.” But you might want to note that both plan on staying within the technology industry however. It will be entertaining to see what both pan out doing in the near future.

What happened to Bebo?

Currently I live in West London - I am 14 years old and I do keep up with the current trends. In Year 7 the prime website to be on was Bebo, I mean you could customize your own skin, add photos and tag them, draw pictures on your friends wall, and give them love! But what happened - why is AOL who brought the company on March 13, 2008 for a costly $850 million saying that it was not worth the investment, they also said that they are planning to sell or take the site down as soon as May 2010. 

I can tell you why: the interface. The interface that Bebo had was very crowded and didn't look very smart and elegant at all - as we grew up from year to year we matured in our tastes and got bored of the layout very quickly.

But indeed, as you should have already guessed; the overall answer to this question is Facebook. As I said everyone's tastes matured so we wanted something new, at the time Facebook was going mainstream and was very simple to use. As we grew older all of the new Year 7's to the school saw what everybody was using, and skipped the "Bebo" stage.

I hope this story was informative to you, as you can see I am a new writer here at SocialBlog and I am looking forward to staying here and being a writer. Thank you for reading!