While in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to visit AOL, see a demo of AOL Journals and meet the team developing the product. Many of my initial impressions were similar to those of Jeff and Clay -- actually, most of my initial impressions were shaped by these write-ups and a briefing from Anil on what I was going to see. Not that this was a bad thing: I'd rather go into a product demo believing that the development team has gotten things right rather than expecting that the product to be utter garbage. Without the New York demos from a couple weeks ago, I would have certainly guessed that the product would have been closer to the latter.
The fact of the matter is that fundamentally, they hit the core weblogging elements on the mark. What they are doing -- whether called journals or weblogs -- is in fact weblogging. The elements are there, the output is familiar and the user behavior resembles all that us "real webloggers" would recognize. This isn't just some message board with a blogging label slapped on -- the AOL Journals team is taking the time and effort to get this right and that's highly commendable. Within a company the size of AOL, this is an amazing feat.
While this sort of praise could be read as a "they didn't crap up their product like we expected and that's good," I'm sincere in saying that they have a good product on their hands. As a weblog tool maker, am I threatened by AOL Journals? I don't think so. We're marketing our tools to entirely different audiences and our users require the level of functionality and customization that would be overkill 1000 times over for AOL. Having tens of millions of AOL users exposed to weblogging can only be a good thing for Six Apart and since we knew that a weblog offering from AOL was coming, we have gotten used to the idea that we'll be sharing the space with a number of the world's largest companies. Yeah, we're the underdogs. Yeah, we're small. But if we sat around all day thinking about all the different ways that the big companies could crush us, we wouldn't have anything for them to crush.
As a blogger, am I threatened by the possibility of another September that will never end? Definitely not. We read and consume weblogs that are of interest to us and to assume that we will be force fed AOL journals because they suddenly exist is as ridiculous as assuming that right now we're aware of all the different groups that make up the current weblogging ecosphere.
My advice to AOL: Keep on embracing what already exists in the weblogging space but be sure to integrate the key features that make AOL distinct. For AOL, it's all about community and simplicity.
