AIMSpace Clarification
Well, I hope I wasn’t one of the folks “raving” about AOL about to launch a “MySpace Killer,” but I did email SiliconBeatÂ? about the news. There is a small post about it on Catchup FridayÂ? by Matt Marshall, and more importantly, there is a link to AOL’s Ted LeonsisÂ? clarifying the situation. Ted makesÂ? a couple interesting points, and I find the whole post to be very political. I’m curious how many users AIM actually has - Ted says 43 million, but AOL’s Press CenterÂ? gives a number of “63 million active users.” But what’s a 20 million difference in the scheme of things.
The way the project is being downplayed is interesting - in another post on the subject, Tina Sharkey, AOL’sÂ? Senior Vice President of Network and Community Programming, made comments similar to those of Mr. Leonsis. AOLTimeWarner has to consider News Corp.’s MySpace to be a threat, and anything that AOL develops that is anything close to MySpace has to be done in a way that can take on MySpace head-on. I purposely didn’t comment on whether “AIMSpace” could be a “MySpace Killer” in my post yesterday. To me, it was more important to discuss the reason why AIMSpace has the potential to be a threat rather than commenting on whether or not it actually is or will be.
With AIMSpace, the potential is there for something to be done well and done big. There have been enough players in the market to have worked out a lot of the major kinks, and it’s well established the consumer generated sites are a huge part of the online world today. Combining a social networking aspect into the AOL umbrella of products is merely a natural progression for the company, much like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN’s social networking sites. By downplaying it, AOL is trying to avoid any sort of negative backlash orÂ? the label of failure. This is totally understandable. But if I was holding the crown, the gold medal so to speak, and I was looking down at number three, and they were doing some things that threatened me being on top, I’d be looking at all sorts of different ways of crushing that movement. Maybe AOL sees things differently, but I have a hard time believing that.