by Victoria Jeffrey

Created on: December 02, 2007

There was once a time when AOL was fun and exciting to use. You could find their installation discs everywhere and the company made it very easy to get online. For those of us that weren't internet savvy back in the mid 90's, AOL gave us the chance to surf the internet, connect with other people online and discover a whole new world! A long time ago many people liked AOL. What happened?

There are four reasons that I can think of:
1. Malware-like behavior - The AOL internet connection setup files were something that came with nearly every computer where Microsoft Windows was installed. Regardless of whether you intended to use the AOL service or not to connect to the internet it was impossible to uninstall AOL from your computer. It's as if it came married to Windows and no matter what you did, short of wiping the hard drive clean and a fresh Windows install, AOL could not be un-installed. This gained AOL the undying hatred of many computer users.

2. The Walled Garden - One of the reasons why AOL has dropped dramatically in popularity is its walled garden approach to its users online. Most savvy internet users scoff at this and it's not hard to see why. It severely limits what you can do and see on the internet. In this way the company is taking on the role of protective parent. I haven't used AOL in years. I've grown far beyond any service that they can provide for me, but there once was a time when I didn't know anything about surfing the internet and AOL helped me in that regard. A walled garden is a selection of sites approved by the ISP that its users are directed towards when surfing. Websites not approved by the ISP may be very difficult to get to unless the user knows the address of the unapproved website. What many internet newbies didn't understand (myself included at the time) was that the internet we were using on AOL was really only it's selected content, sites and services that it wanted its customers to see and experience. In a walled garden environment users may have a very difficult time getting outside the garden to the REAL internet. AOL had very large walled garden and most people who used it didn't realize this until later, but the walled garden approach still severely restricted people's access to the world wide web, no matter how big the garden. Especially when you consider how big the internet actually is. To be honest, I don't really fault them for this approach. AOL was and still is aimed at people who aren't computer savvy. It's like

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