20 Nov 08 Do You Use This Free Phone Service?
Do you use the AIM Free phone line service? I tried it out for a while some time back, and it worked quite well if you didn’t mind running AIM on your desktop all the time.
AIM Free Phoneline is
I haven’t used it since I moved my business lines to Skype, which gives me much more portability, and the ability to use my cellphone as well via their service. AIM free phone line tied you to your desk. Still it was, well, free, and it was useful before I had GrandCentral to separate my personal and business calls for me.
Anyway, it’s another service that AOL are closing down. From January 13, 2009, it will be no more. They seem to be taking stuff down bit by bit. The AOL journals went recently too.
I don’t use AOL myself these days, and I only dabbled with it out of curiosity in the past, but they seem to be slowing fading away. They’ve attempted to become more and more part of the ‘mainstream’ internet in recent times, but I wonder if they’ve left it too late. Perhaps they could have been one of the leaders of Social Media Networking if they’d followed a different strategy. After all like ‘em or loathe ‘em they were one of the leaders at one time in online connectivity, with millions of customers. It was where the majority of the newbies went, and it was part of the crapware installed on many many store-bought home PCs.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I had one of those AOL CDs appear in my mailbox…
Tags: aim, aol cds, bit by bit, business calls, business lines, cellphone, connectivity, crapware, curiousity, desk, free phone line, home pcs, journals, last time, mainstream internet, newbies, skype
