Will Morris, AOL's man in Silicon Valley — they still have someone in Silicon Valley? — is mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. His peeve? Commenters who say "silly" things about AOL. He's vowed to track them down and respond to their comments. The response on Morris's blog has shown off the scintillating intellect AOL users are known for. The latest comment:
Tomorrow, Netscape is officially dead: AOL is ending support for the venerable browser. But its offspring, Firefox, is thriving. Both Netscape and Firefox had several brushes with death. In 1998, "Microsoft was driving their monster truck after us and they were about to pin us to the wall," former Netscape software engineer Brendan Eich recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that could happen, however, Netscape execs James Barksdale, Eric Hahn, Mike Homer and cofounder Marc Andreessen decided to open the browser's source code to the community. Behold, Mozilla. But the organization wasn't independent of Netscape owner AOL yet. And here's a shocker, AOL executives nearly killed Mozilla through neglect. So who saved the baby?
So rarely do the executives who strike deals have to execute them. The hard work of fitting acquired companies together is usually left to less-glamorous grunts. How satisfying, then, to see Jon Werther, recently in charge of business development at AOL, made responsible for "integrated operations". Werther will have his hands full shaping AOL's numerous online-advertising acquisitions into the new Platform A business. Specifically, we hear that the folks at Advertising.com, AOL's third-party Web-ads network, loathe the newcomers from Tacoda. Good luck with that, Jon.
Before the holidays, AOL products chief Kevin Conroy urged employees to send a form letter to their friends, family members, and business contacts talking up AOL's new products. "Team, excitement about the work we are doing ... starts with each one of us," Conroy emailed. His topdown directive did not spark any bottom-up fervor, it seems, as he had to forward the message again on Friday, asking employees for examples of get-out-the-users emails they'd sent. The full memo:
Jeffrey Bewkes begins work today as chief executive of Time Warner, the world's biggest old-school media conglomerate. One person who won't be celebrating Bewkes' ascension is Ron Grant, who runs day-to-day operations at Time Warner's internet division, AOL, which is downtown New York's biggest internet business since the headquarters moved from Virginia. Grant, an AOL veteran who masterminded some of the sketchier deals of the last internet boom but returned from disgrace, is so brainy that he's been nicknamed "the human computer". But the new Time Warner boss doesn't rate his mechanical exec's managerial competence. Grant is pictured here: better grab hold of that handrail.
The surprise in AOL discontinuing the Netscape browser isn't that the Netscape browser is gone. It's that it was still alive, and that anyone was still working on it. From the moment AOL bought Netscape in 1998 this was a foregone conclusion. AOL was interested in Netscape's Web traffic, not its browser; it continued using Microsoft's internet Explorer in its online service even after the acquisition. That it took AOL nine years to finally kill off the Netscape browser speaks to the Internet giant's fatal sluggishness. Not to mention its unresponsiveness to customers. Netscape has long been nothing but a memory. With its antiquated and buggy browser gone, it can now be a fond one.
Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.
Jonathan Miller, the man who was ungracefully booted as AOL CEO, and Ross Levinsohn, the former Fox Interactive Media chief who was never quite as in charge of MySpace as he would have liked, will form a new group at VC firm ComVentures, SAI reports. They're callng it Velocity Interactive Group. The pair plan to invest $20 million to $30 million in digital media startups in 2008 and already, they plan to close as many four deals in February. Wait, doesn't this sound familiar?
Ask, Yahoo, Microsoft and others tried really hard this year to gain on search leader Google. They failed. AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft all dropped in share. Ask gained 0.1 percent. Google? Up as much as 6 percent, depending on whom you ask. Google also had larger gains in terms of total search queries, up 37 percent. Those Stanford kids are onto something. [AdAge]
Following Yahoo into the murky depths of online-finance video, AOL is launching a revamp of its AOL Money & Finance site with video prominently included. Yahoo Finance and Microsoft's MSN Money are the top two finance sites by a wide margin. AOL is hoping to give its users compelling reasons to stick around, rather than risk their discovery of better sites like the woefully underpublicized Google Finance.
AOL's search engine Truveo put out a list of the top video searches for 2007. The list includes Will Ferrell's Web classic "The Landlord," an excerpt of which runs above. Here's the list of videos, complete with links, so you don't have to use Truveo anymore.
Here are the dangers of imitation: Google has rolled out a new search results page. When I search for vitamin water, I get video and products results in the right-hand sidebar. This is a variation on AOL's old FullView search results — a design AOL labored over and then discarded in favor of blindly copying Google. The design is moderately helpful for me, as I was trying to find an online distributor for Vitaminwater. Not all of my colleagues see the new results, so Google may be slowly rolling this out from datacenter to datacenter. As for AOL? Having abandoned the idea of innovation in search, it now finds itself needing to copy Google just to get back to where it started. Full screenshot is below the jump.
Looking for that perfect holiday gift for the suddenly ex-AOLer in your life? Look no further than Valleywag tipster "Bob Zmuda," whose latest additions to the T-shirt line are now on Flickr. Our favorite? Zmuda's commemoration of AOL's 2007 Christmas party. That's the one soon-to-be-laid-off employees weren't invited to, thus discovering their fate.
AOL has stopped selling videos online and instead is throwing its weight behind Amazon's Unbox download service. AOL, which is shifting from paid downloads to ad-supported video plays, will include Unbox-sold videos in video search results. Amazon.com has not had much success with Unbox and is getting soundly beaten by Apple's iTunes. This deal's unlikely to change that.
A soon-to-be former AOL employee confirms the rumors of mid-December layoff. The holidays are always an embarrassing time to let employees go, but what's worse is the way management delivered the bad news. Our source tells us that "when the brain trusts sent out the holiday party email they only sent it to people who would still be here — even though some of us hadn't been notified we were on the block yet." Dear employee, you're not invited to continue working at the company. Yours cordially, Mgmt.
