I haven’t always been in Atlanta. Moving from Washington, DC in 2005, I had spent well over a decade there. When I first moved there in 1994, it seemed everyone I met was attached to a law firm, association/nonprofit, or the government. America Online had already been in existence since 1983 (I was shocked to just rediscover – Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aol), but by the mid-‘90s it had truly become the power player beating out Compuserve, Delphi, Prodigy, and many other pre-web players. AOL was pumping out CDs to your mailbox at a rapid rate. People used to get so many, that they became fodder for artwork (http://www.flickr.com/photos/perlgirl/1306834201/).
The mid-‘90s also coincided with a lot of other technology players in the metro DC area, but America Online was one of the biggies. Every design and technology firm claimed them as a client included the one I worked for, we developed all sorts of content areas which was wonderfully sheltered from the rest of the emerging internet. There were 30 million users at its pinnacle.
In early 2000, AOL and Time Warner announced the “merger”. I remember talking to people in AOL and they didn’t really have a sense of what was happening. While it was an obvious media and advertising driven play, it just didn’t seem logical for it to be called AOL. Over the years, the brand continued to evolve as the AOL side of the business faded.
Well, the honeymoon and then the tumultuous marriage are finally coming to an end. Time Warner announced today that it will spin off AOL. Former Google advertising executive Tim Armstrong will be at the helm, so it will be interesting to see where AOL goes and whether it can survive.