By: Anne Haynes

If you want to comment on this post – I’m a cobbler with bad shoes ;-) talk to me via social media @AnneHaynes

I remember in 1995 when AOL was the number 1 platform for internet access and Yahoo! was the number 1 search engine. During this time, when I socialized and talked about the internet everyone would talk about AOL. I was a producer for KSJS radio station and we broadcasted video and audio over the internet with an 8100 PowerPC AV. The show was Sound Bytes and Dan Fortune (my mentor) was the host for the technology radio/internet show. Dan Fortune was the first man to play guitar over the internet. All I wanted was to learn about building website. I knew I needed to be into HTML in order to have a website and by having an internship at KSJS an entire world opened up to me. I still can’t believe I’m writing about real-time video and audio in 1995 in the times of social media in 2009.

Bottom-line during the 1995-1997 era, mainstream people thought “the internet” was AOL. And in my world Netscape was “my internet” and Yahoo! was my number 1 search engine. When I talked about “internet radio” everyone mentioned AOL and not Yahoo!. AOL was the “Internet” and AOL members recieved applications via their service provider = AOL; AOL decided what you would see and what you would like as a paying subscriber.

After I graduated from San Jose State University with a Management Information Systems Degree and started working at Cisco System as an Information Systems Analyst I figured it out. At Cisco Systems I worked with teams to turn excel spreadsheets into databases with a pretty HTML/CSS look and feel (geekstrs:cgi and perl). It clicked and I figured it out; you were not informed if you were using AOL as your internet service provider (ISP). AOL was an application service provider (ASP).

Now fast forward to Facebook, the Harvard environment opened up and everyone can be a member of Facebook. It didn’t take long for Facebook applications to take off. Remember how AOL was the application service provider. Now 200 million plus Facebook members are haunted by applications. As much as I like a few of the Facebook applications, I don’t like the advertisements and forced “Send to Friends” features. I’ve seen so much spam and advertising rip-offs. All I want to do is hang out from a social media perspective. This is why my primary non-facebook applications are Brightkite.com > to Twitter.com> to Friendfeed.com> to Facebook. I have the easy button for social media and if you need some help send me a message on any of the solo social media applications by searching on @AnneHaynes. I will find your message and respond.

Remember, if you’ve never had an AOL account you are in good shape, but note Myspace and Facebook are ASPs.