Simon Willison’s Weblog

A Year Later, AOL Is Contemplating A Bebo Sale. Ignore the headline and read the actual article—Mike Butcher’s description of how Bebo targeted old fashioned TV advertising agencies while other social networks ignored them completely is riveting.

# 27th January 2009, 6:13 pm / advertising, bebo, aol, mike-butcher, agencies

Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse. Jason Scott on AOL’s closure of Hometown, their hosting service. In related news, Lycos just announced they are closing Tripod, which has been providing free hosting for 13 years.

# 18th January 2009, 8:48 am / jason-scott, eviction, archive, tripod, lycos, aol, hometown

ficlets memorial. Here’s a great argument for Creative Commons—AOL shut down Ficlets without providing an archive or export tool, but the license meant Ficlets co-creator Kevin Lawver could scrape and preserve all of the content anyway.

# 14th January 2009, 10:02 pm / ficlets, aol, archive, preservation, data, creativecommons, kevinlawver

Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts. And they’re using the password anti-pattern to get them! Despite both Yahoo! and Hotmail (and Google themselves; not sure about AOL) offering a safe, OAuth-style API for retrieving contacts without asking for a password. This HAS to be a communications failure somewhere within Google. Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they’re the ones most likely to be targetted by phishers. Shameful.

# 15th September 2008, 10:39 am / shameful, google, passwordantipattern, oauth, aol, yahoo, hotmail, ffs, security, phishing

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! jwz has recreated home.mcom.com, the original home of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, using a snapshot from 21st October 1994 and a domain borrowed from current owner AOL. Also includes instructions on running 1994 Mosaic Netscape binaries under a modern Linux distro.

# 31st March 2008, 5:54 pm / aol, jwz, mosaic, history, linux, netscape, browsers

AOL & OpenID—Status Update. It looks like they’re whitelisting a small list of providers for the moment. I’m not sure what this means for delegation.

# 15th August 2007, 6:34 pm / openid, aol

Pibb Sign in page. Nice demonstration of an easier OpenID sign in page—lets you sign in with an AIM screenname or LiveJournal username instead (which uses OpenID under the hood).

# 14th July 2007, 9:09 pm / openid, livejournal, aim, aol, pibb, janrain

Ficlets (via) AOL’s first application to launch on Rails, and their first application to accept OpenIDs as well as AOL screen names.

# 10th March 2007, 5:41 pm / aol, rails, ficlets, openid, openidconsumer

phpbb-openid: Your AIM screen name is your OpenID. Log in to a phpBB board with an AOL OpenID and it will try to associate your OpenID with an account that lists that AIM in the profile. This is the kind of behaviour I talked about in my FOWA talk.

# 6th March 2007, 7:57 am / phpbb, openid, fowa, aim, aol, phpbbopenid

AOL and OpenID. http://openid.aol.com/your-screenname now works as an OpenID, for every AOL user. Wow.

# 15th February 2007, 11:27 am / aol, openid

Atom API for AOL Journals. AOL are doing some really cool things with the Atom Publishing Protocol.

# 10th January 2007, 11:06 pm / atom, aol, app

Including Dojo, The Really Easy Way. Drop in a single include to load code on demand from AOL’s CDN.

# 28th November 2006, 12:22 pm / dojo, aol, cdn, javascript