23rd Apr 2004
AOL.Com, revisited
In the 90’s, I spent some time in San Mateo, CA, working on AOL.Com. What we launched then was something to be proud of. The site would later deteriorate into a pale ghost of itself.
Or should I say a flashing ghost of itself? It became an embarassing
cornucopia of in-house promos and ads. Not something I wanted to be
associated with. For the most part, I was in a semi-retirement mode
from 1998-2003, and somewhat blocked out about the whole AOL.Com
experience.
The site has recently gotten much better. We’re launching 3 channels
today (the 22nd): movies, music, and tv. And I do mean “we”, as I have been
working on this since last December. My big part has been
transforming flash and html mockups of the photo gallery module into
what you’ll see on the site: living, breathing, dynamic, usable,
data-driven, real-world … you get the point (and I’ll reach for a
pint). It’s great to see a lot of content being made easily accesible
from AOL.Com.
I had a hand in a few other modules as well, but my focus has been on
the galleries. It has meant that I have put FlexiPhoto (which is my
personal, doesn’t pay me anything project) on the shelf, but have been
able to at least keep in touch with the idea of photo galleries (and
get paid for it). It’s not an all-singing and dancing module with
keyword searching and more (like FlexiPhoto), but it’s a pretty good
first cut. It should serve pretty well for casual browsing.
I’m too close to the resulting site to give an objective opinion about
it. A weak point is that it is driven by AOLServer and Tcl, as
opposed to Apache and PHP, Perl, and others of that ilk. On the other
hand, what matters most is the user experience. If you have any
feedback on the site, I would love to hear it. There’s a lot of
functionality to explore.
Some entry points:
