Dec 09, 2001 05:47 AM
2858 Views
(Updated Dec 09, 2001 05:47 AM)
That's exactly what all of the emails that are lining the bottom of my AOL inbox like crap in my cat's litter box say. Unfortunately, I can't seem to do a thing about it. This, however, can't be the full description of a company that is as massive as AOL Time Warner... They obviously must have some good points... afterall, they are one of the largest, most successful internet ventures to date and they are definitely profitable unlike many of the internet startups these days... so, lets find out why such a pile of festering of dog woohoo, could be so wonderful...
Dialing up, connecting to the system
Remember those commercials, where AOL is flicking though a bunch of different images of AOL users using AOL and then you suddenly hear, ''Welcome, welcome, Goodbye''??? Well, that's the perfectiond description of the dial up process for AOL. However, that's only after you spend half of your night trying to figure out who could possibly want to be on the internet at 2 in the morning on a Thursday night. Doesn't anyone have school or work the next day? This seems to be a huge problem with AOL. The only time that no one is on, is the only time that you can get online and that's also the only time that you either don't have the opportunity to get online or don't want to get on line... Which basically makes it completely pointless.
Aol provides a very wide range of dial-up access phone numbers throughout the country. There's virtually no area where you can't connect through AOL, which is excellent if you travel a lot and need access to the internet. Just a couple of clicks and you can change your access number depending upon where you're calling from. This is definitely a great thing if you have a laptop and want to go online from your boring hotel room.
I guestimate that out of all of the times that I have ever tried to log on, I get online about 70% of the time, which really isn't all that good, considering when you pay for a service, you generally believe that you can use it whenever it is available... and AOL is open 24 hours/365 days a year, so what's the problem???
Software itself
I don't know if I should even get started on how AOL software is probably the most worthless in the world. Just to give you an example of just how worthless it is... AOL owns Netscape and they don't even use their own browser, they use Internet Explorer. ;) That seems to glimmer with confidence.
Overall the software is fine for helping in the load up times and it speeds up the network substantially, unfortunately if you aren't interested in using just AOL features you are definitely screwed. It is nearly impossible to do anything on the internet without having some very strange viewing problems on websites. A lot of the websites are totally unviewable with the modified Internet Explorer AOL browser... Even a lot of newsletters that you may be interested in subscribing to will be automatically banned from AOL because of their software... So AOL users, while gaining a massive community and online database of content, lose out on the masses of content producing websites that can't support AOL in their operations.
What to do? Don't worry, you can always just download a separate copy of Internet Explorer and look at all websites using that and then use AOL as your source to looking at those websites from Internet Explorer. That's a very easy fix... the better one is to replace AOL with a cable modem or something better...
Ease of use
For the beginner AOL is definitely the best around. There is no other online service provider that caters to the newbie as well as AOL does.... with the massive graphical interface throughout the site, it's nearly impossible to get lost when you wander off looking for things... unless you go straight to the internet.
Everything about AOL is simple from sending email, attaching pictures, even setting up a website is extremely easy. You will find that AOL isn't really comparable to any other service in that aspect.
SPAM!
Want SPAM, get AOL, enough said about that! They are definitely the king of spam. They are targetted heavily by marketing firms around the world because of their massive userbase and the ease in which snagging AOL usernames is. Once they have your name, they will generally sell your name to a few other companies and then you'll end up with a viral effect and the email will continuously come in.
While there are filters that will prevent such a thing from happening, they aren't very good and will often times block out emails that you did want to receive... SO, you have to be extremely careful when selecting your security/viewing options on AOL or you could end up doing something that you didn't want to do in the first place.
OVERALL
Overall, AOL is horrible for logging on and basically makes it so difficult to sign onto the internet, that it's probably not worth the wait, because you've run out of time for surfing the net while waiting for a break in the busy signals to finally get online, sometimes you'll just have to go to sleep without checking mail or talking with friends.
AOL also will continuously kick off it's users to ensure that everyone gets a fair share at it. This is really bad, especially if you are filling out a really long form online, because it will send you all of the way out and won't allow you to save what you were doing... I've lost a lot of content because of AOL and I don't want others to lose it as well...
If you are a newbie though, I would recommend AOL before I would recommend anything else. I would however also recommend that the more experienced users just go straight for a cable modem... Cable may just be too overwhelming though for the newbies as it's very difficult for the more experienced to figure out what they're doing sometimes.
