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'Mediocre' Facebook Following AOL's Path

Sam Biddle: It's trying 'to be' the Internet, just like AOL did—badly

By John Johnson, Newser Staff

Posted Mar 9, 2011 11:47 AM CST | Updated Mar 9, 2011 1:51 PM CST

(Newser) – So now we'll be able to watch movies on Facebook. And play Angry Birds. And pretty much everything else, the way things are going. "Facebook is reaching its tendrils into every single thing we like about the Internet, far, far beyond the actual reasons we rolled up to Zuckerberg's site in the first place," writes Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. That strategy remind you of anything? Try AOL back in the 1990s.

AOL tried to be the everything of the Internet and flamed out in mediocrity. Facebook has big advantages—it's social and not as closed as AOL was—but the site's "also mediocre, because no company online can be good at everything and so it's always ugly when they try," writes Biddle. Zuckerberg's creation "wants to be Netflix, it wants to be your Xbox, it wants to be Foursquare, it wants to be Gmail—Facebook wants to be the Internet." But the Internet's just fine the way it is, with specialized sites. We don't need another failed web portal. Click to read the full column.

A Facebook page. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

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COMMENTS

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Showing 3 of 12 comments

janbee

Mar 9, 2011 5:42 PM CST

Facebook is here now enjoy it until the next best thing comes along. No need to get so freaked out over this "little evil empire"..........Just like anything else if you get yourself too worked up - you'll get constipated!

njguy54

Mar 9, 2011 3:58 PM CST

AOL and Facebook are clearly similar, but they're different in that back in the day, AOL was not just content but the mechanism through which you got online. Before, if you wanted to get on the Internet, you had to know your way around a number of hard-to-configure programs. AOL made getting online easy. But as people abandoned dial-up connections for faster DSL and cable, users didn't need AOL to connect anymore. All it has left was content, which was replicated any number of places.

sonarman73

Mar 9, 2011 2:49 PM CST

Facebook is the Charlie Sheen of the internet... Winning!!

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'Mediocre' Facebook Following AOL's Path

Sam Biddle: It's trying 'to be' the Internet, just like AOL did—badly

OTHER STORIES ON OUR RADAR

Internet • AOL • Facebook

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Result: Facebook gets 650 AOL patents

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Sergey Brin sees threat from governments, Hollywood, Facebook

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