Geesh! I just read this article. It outlines the top sites from 1996. Fifteen years of web history. Just check out the reporting formats.
In the list of the top 20 sites listed here, five of them reported to me during my career at AOL. Three of them at the same time.
AOL, Webcrawler and GNN back in 1996. Netscape and CompuServe later in the decade.
Then and now.
I feel old but experienced. This was nostalgic and fun to read. Thank you.
I like it. I like the inter op and I like the interface.
I am still connected. I went to AIM Fight and still had 200,000 or so interconnections live.
AIM. Check it out. Still the best instant messaging client software out there. Thank you.
I still use AIM. Do you? See this article.
I have some fun once in a while on AIM Fight.
I sure wish AIM Pages had worked.
Twitter feels like AIM status messaging to me introduced in 1996.
AIM was the first online product to dazzle and delight people.
AIM was fun. Light. Easy to use.
It worked. It scaled.
At its height, 14 million people around the world were using it at the same time!
It was an inspiration to many.
The first social network.
The first virally marketed product.
Kudos to the pioneers behind this great product and service from AOL. The good ole days!
Nostalgia is good but I still use AIM. I am proud to say that, too.
When asked what is old, most people say 15 to 20 years older than themselves.
Ask a 20 year old, he or she says 35 to 40 seems old.
Ask a 45 year old, he or she says 60 to 65 years of age.
Alley Insider just ran a story about established websites and how it will make you feel old.
They link to Whenthewhat.com and this list starts with IMDB in 1992.
I will link to America Online/Control Video in 1983. I am old! See Wiki here.
Time flies when you are having fun.
I saw this article and smiled.
I once did a deal with the nice people from Mars, Inc at AOL and we launched a customized M&Ms promotion in 1998.
You could order your own M&Ms and choose the color and what you wanted to be messaged on the candy. Order it online and have it delivered overnight. “Clicks instead of bricks.” You could then send some candy as gifts to folks on your buddy list. They would be alerted to this nice gesture by you on email.
We had our members’ credit cards on file, more than 35 million of them.
We, too, wanted to get a piece of every transaction.
We, too, were all about social, community, platforms and payments.
After a while, AOL just took folks’ dollars as sponsorship and ad revenues.
Good to see Facebook running this play in the playbook. It is a good one.
AOL is valued at about $ 2 billion plus.
Yahoo is valued at about $ 20 billion plus.
And Google is valued at almost $ 200 billion.
There is a message in here somewhere. It amazes me. Google is now trading at 100 times AOL. Wow.
I don’t see plenty of upside in our slide.
I gave a basic one word answer to a tough question, “Yes.” 
We did get a point. We did hit plenty of posts.
While we are at it, I am not a cyber tycoon. I was a long term exec at AOL, the publisher of this blog Fanhouse.
I was there at the birth of AOL Sports.
I did say to the blogger, “Do you have confidence in AOL and in Tim Armstrong?” I am a blogger, too, you know.
Just trying to be funny.
A. J. said “Yes.” Glad to hear that!
Read this one. Must have been a slow news day.
I am sure someone at AOL before me must have been talking about Social Media and Social Networks. It was a natural extension out of community, content, context, etc. and the early work in AIM and instant messaging. AOL pioneers must have had first use of this term. I am probably sure I talked about it even before 1997 as noted here, too.
This reporter called me after he did his search and said I had a first public use of the term. I said, “Who cares?”
And I still say, “Who cares?”
I ain’t competing for credit. Too funny.
I was shocked in 1994. We had acquired ICQ at AOL. We needed to create revenue streams around it so we added a search box to the control panel.
I thought that this was a great consumer benefit. The ICQ messenger service was always on. It had persistence. It was right in front of you. A customer could talk to a friend and then search the web without firing up a browser. This was convenient and would generate lots of click through and lots of dollars for us.
It was a complete dud.
When we researched why we found that consumers take their friend to friend communications very seriously. They don’t get into any other mode outside of communications. They don’t want to be distracted.