AOL is Luckier than Ryan Seacrest
If there could ever be anything luckier than a talentless nobody like Ryan Seacrest actually becoming famous, it would be AOL becoming a coveted commodity of the world’s biggest internet powerhouses.

Blasé from the Past
Oh you remember AOL, right? That free disk you got in the mail that you still won’t admit having installed on your first computer. That restrictive internet access. The unwieldy email client. The crippling amounts of spam. Those cancellation calls to them, where by the end you had to beg them not to give you another free month. That software that you couldn’t get off of your computer without a complete reformatting of your hard drive. In fact, the code was so malicious that it prompted Ray Owens to create the very funny satirical AOL Virus warning: likening AOL’s software to a debilitating computer virus.

Well now that same AOL (I’m sorry, as of this month, they’re AOL, inc. *yawn*) is being wooed by the most powerful companies the internet and the search industry have to offer.

The Chicken or the Egg?
To be honest, it’s hard to remember who threw the first punch, but the outcome is the same: Google and Microsoft are fighting over AOL. Then before I could blink dumbfoundedly that anyone would want AOL: Yahoo, Comcast, and News Corp. had lined up as well. Update: Even before I finished writing this article, this announcement was released telling of AOL’s new agreement with blog search engine: BlogPulse.

Does each suitor only want AOL in order to prevent the other ones from getting it? That was my first thought, but upon further reflection, it doesn’t look that simple after all.

It’s the End of the World Wide Web as we know it (and I feel fine)
An ill-conceived ISP is not the center of this fight. Neither is the fight about seizing more land than your foe. This isn’t even about a war between search engine companies anymore; this is about how people and businesses use the web on a fundamental level. This is about becoming partners with a company with far-reaching global power, a solid base of programmers, and an enormous communications infrastructure. As further proof of these grandiose goals: even apart from this venture, Google is working on “a global data transfer network that could effectively serve as a private Internet.”

This isn’t about controlling the internet: it’s about becoming the internet.

...and the Winner is?
Please forgive the cliché, but the winner here is clearly us: the consumers. Almost all great leaps forward in innovation happen because of fierce competition, and this folks is nothing if not that. Follow this one closely. No one can predict how this one will end but you can be sure that the outcome will affect the landscape of the internet in a major way. Especially since 3 of the 5 suitors mentioned above are the 3 search giants themselves.

Regardless of who walks away with AOL at the end of this one, expect to see “search” becoming much more than a textbox and a set of results, 10 links per page. These companies have big plans and this is only the beginning.
Robert McRackan | permalink | +marktd |