AOL Review

I must confess I was not an early adopter of AOL. I was a casual observer on their earlier product Quantum Link, which my post-college roommate used. I didn't see the value in paying for the service's hourly rate. I didn't create my own account on AOL until they switched to a flat monthly fee. I was a member off and on from about 1999 to 2005. I used several different screen names, trying on different identities and different interests, but ultimately, my main use was to cruise the AOL M4M chat rooms. Around 2002 or 2003, there could have been as many as 8 "DallasM4M" rooms due to the 21 member limit to their chat rooms. By the time they finally upped the limit to 35, the local userbase could only support 2 such larger rooms. The 3rd room would eventually form when DallasM4M1 and DallasM4M2 were too full to hammer into, but it wouldn't grow enough to be usable. I'm sure I'll be relating some of those stories later, but I wanted to establish some background for this review. I'm using AOL 9.1 for this review, but some of my history may refer back to versions as early as 4.0.

POPULATION:

Because AOL is a public, general use service, the population is very diverse including people of all ages and backgrounds regardless of sexual orientation. They have a dating system powered by match.com which is outside the scope of this review. AOL has a gay community, QueerSighted, which I've never used and will not include in this review. I'm sure there are other areas that some gay men will find useful, but the primary areas in my experience are the M4M chat rooms, the AOL profile system, e-mail and instant messenger which form the backbone of the services that came later.

PROFILE:

AOL has been changing the "People Connection" profile system over the last 5 years or s. Previously, it was a limited number of fields (Name, Location, Marital Status, Hobbies and Interests, Occupation, and Personal Quote) and there were certain words you couldn't say (SLUT, for example) and other words the system would let you put, but were subject to being reported as inappropriate by other members. Now, you have a free form "About Me" that can include formatting, links and images, "My Photo," "Personal Details," "Interests," "Pictures," "Themes," "Code Snippet," and "Privacy Settings." The My Photo seems very intuitive and is your primary profile photo. You can add more photos using the "Pictures" section of the profile and separate them into named albums. The "Interests" tab lets you have free form fields for Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books/Magazines, Activities, Love It, and Hate It. The "Personal Details" provides for some of the usual searchable data elements like Name (First and/or Last if you want to give that much information), Birthday with options to display either current age or birthday, Gender (male, female, or leave it unspecified), Relationship Status (with 6 choices like Single, In A Relationship, Divorced), Looking For (Casual Dating, Long-Term Relationships) and With Men or Women, or less gender-specific things like Friendship, Online Buddies, Networking Contacts or Ask Me. You can give some location information, occupation, web links, and up to 4 quotes. The "Themes" is just wallpaper and color schemes. You can add a custom HTML code snippet if you'd like, so you can easily embed YouTube videos or the latest internet meme. In actual usage, the gay men left on the site haven't really gone to the trouble of fleshing out their profiles, so don't expect much.

SEARCHING:

You'd think AOL would shine at such a basic task, but the recent changes in the profile system haven't kept pace with the search feature. In other words, Searching sucks. The initial search form lets you fill in search words for the various profile fields, but the default is to only return results "with profile pictures" but it doesn't return anything until you search again from a more limited search form. Once you get results, they are inconsistent: it may say "53 results" found and show the first 10, but when you go to page 2, it doesn't show more than a few more results.

MESSAGING:

This is AOL's biggest strength: E-mail and instant messaging. They basically invented instant messaging and have spent a lot of time and effort into making both e-mail and IM flexible, dependable, and highly customizable. You can basically e-mail or instant message anyone from AOL if you know their AOL or AIM screen name. In fact, the Buddy List is now labeled "AIM" to make it clear that it is fully interoperable with the standalone AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Both email and IM have extensive privacy settings allowing you to control who can contact you by which method. The last time I was a regular user, I had a huge block list of both spammers and flakes as well the allowed buddies. I would use AIM to export those lists and reimport them to new screen names so I could automatically and semi-intelligently screen new contacts. I opted to keep it fresh this time and still got a couple of those pesky old flakes chasing after me.
A few years ago, AOL started automatically adding new email and IM contacts to a special Buddy List group called "Recent Buddies." This can be handy when trying to remember who you talked to before, but can also create confusion since it doesn't differentiate e-mail contacts and IM contacts. I received some executable virus attachment e-mails (files masquerading as screen savers) from a couple of other members, sometimes they end up in the Spam folder and sometimes they don't. Those users ended up on my Recent Buddies list and I ended up on theirs. One contacted me to see if I remembered talking to him and wouldn't believe me when I claimed it was from a virus e-mail sent from his screen name.
Other recent enhancements include multiple attachment methods in E-mail (inserting multiple inline images versus attaching a single archive file), "Instant Images" in IMs, "Live Video" (webcam), "AOL Talk" and "Send File," however, these require recent versions of the official AOL clients and may not work with all users.

PREMIUM:

Using the full AOL client is a premium feature at $9.99 per month. If you just want the basic IM and E-mail, the AIM client and access is free. The M4M chat rooms I've mentioned require the premium AOL client and are found in the Town Square "Created by AOL Members" portion of the People Connection Chat (Keyword: Chat Room Listings). If you don't find your city on the first page, be sure and click "More" to see more chat rooms.

MOBILE:

AOL has a mobile browser portal at mobile.aol.com where you can access your e-mail on the go. There are numerous IM clients for various phones and mobile devices. AOL also offers a "Mobile AOL" client for particular models of phones for an additional $19.95 that integrates the E-mail and IM into a specific application, but there is no support for chat rooms on the go.

WARNINGS:

The only warning I have is "how the mighty have fallen." I wouldn't say it is completely useless as the remaining people are generally friendly; however, all the wrong things are still wrong, like bots spamming the chat room, escorts, massage therapists and other rent boys occupying space in the limited chat room. There are also plenty of closeted, no profile, no picture people hanging around that have the potential to be hidden gems or complete flakes, so proceed with caution.