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What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0

Started by dhilipkumar, Jul 16, 2009, 09:21 AM

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dhilipkumar

What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0

Everyone's abuzz about Web 2.0, and it's no wonder. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are some of the Internet's most popular destinations, offering users unprecedented freedom to share content, engage in conversations and exchange ideas like never before.


Whatever their individual fates, these services live on not just in memory, but in their impact on the development of subsequent online communities. Even today's social networks could learn a lesson or two from the old online services

CompuServe
Founded: 1969 (as Compu-Serv Network); 1979 (as CompuServe Information Service)
Status: Available at CompuServe.com

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as a way for Golden United Life Insurance's computers to earn their keep via time-sharing to other businesses.

Users were given numeric IDs, such as 75162.3001 -- an artifact of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 computers upon which the service was founded -- but members could create handles by which to identify themselves in the various message boards and chat areas.

Delphi
Founded: 1981
Status: Available at DelphiForums.com

Unlike some of its competitors, which were started as side projects at larger organizations, Delphi was founded in 1981 with the goal of providing online access to information. It was launched by author Wes Kussmaul as Kussmaul Encyclopedia, the first online encyclopedia. By 1982, it featured message boards, e-mail and chat rooms as well.

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dhilipkumar

Prodigy
Founded: 1984 (as Trintex);1989 (as Prodigy)
Status: Subsumed into AT&T/Yahoo

In the early 1980s, an experiment in shopping and on-demand news delivery using television set-top boxes led three corporations to launch a colorful new online service. It was called Trintex, and unlike older services such as CompuServe and The Source, it wasn't tied to a dull ASCII interface. When it launched in four markets in 1984, this joint venture between IBM,

Despite the fact that subscribers were assigned such alphanumeric salads as PXTB03Z for usernames, Prodigy grew from 100,000 to half a million subscribers in the first year, then doubled to almost a million by 1991.

Prodigy's subscriber base was fickle, and it suffered major attrition as it increased its monthly rates and began charging for previously free services such as e-mail and chat. The stable subscriber base probably peaked at around 460,000.

GEnie
Founded: 1985
Status: Defunct

GEnie -- named for its owner, General Electric -- was founded in 1985 as a time-sharing service, like CompuServe. But GE rarely gave this side business the resources necessary to compete with its more industrious kin; for example, while CompuServe and AOL offered both text and graphical interfaces, GEnie was almost exclusively text-based.

Whereas CompuServe appealed to professionals, GEnie had much to offer consumers and hobbyists. Members could interact with each other in flight simulators, trivia games and MUDs -- multi-user dungeons, the text-based precursors to today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

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dhilipkumar

America Online (AOL)
Founded: 1985 (as Quantum Link); 1988 (as AppleLink and PC Link); 1989 (as America Online)
Status: Available at AOL.com

AOL's road to being the largest dial-up Internet service provider in the world started humbly with a gaming site for Commodore computer users in the mid-1980s. Quantum Computer Services provided dial-up access to gaming servers that pioneered the massively multiplayer online experience enjoyed by World of Warcraft aficionados today

But the company still grew, like the Internet market in general. At its peak in 2002, AOL had more than 26 million subscribers, but not all of those were necessarily active members in the AOL community. By then, AOL was favored as a dial-up ISP rather than a community in its own right. When broadband subsequently ate away at AOL's dial-up business, its subscriber base fell back down to around 6 million dial-up subscribers worldwide at the beginning of 2009.

Lessons learned
So what can the online services of old teach the online communities of today? Here are some truths universally acknowledged:

Give them something worth coming back for
In a 2008 USA Today interview, bSocial Network's Bill Eager identified about 850 active social networks and predicted there would be a quarter of a million within the year. With that kind of competition, it's inevitable that many of today's social networks will go the way of The Source and GEnie.

Encourage true self expression
Right from its start in the mid-'80s, the online community known as the WELL had one of the best-defined policies about self expression, and it came in slogan form: You Own Your Own Words. YOYOW was a double-edged sword: There was no fear that the WELL would try to claim ownership over your intellectual property, but you were also responsible for what you said. On the WELL, anybody could trace your real name, so the iconic New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" didn't apply.

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javalitaliano

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