Facebook is the new AOL
Earlier in the week, I made a comment in passing in a post about Vimeo: … A few people picked up on it and speculated what I might have meant by it. In reading those posts and poking around a bit, I found a post that Scott Heiferman made just after Facebook Platform launched in May:
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after the Facebook Platform launched at f8, the 'walled garden' question has moved from developer blogs to mainstream commentary. Unit Structures' early platform analysis framed the strategic stakes in May, and by mid-June analysts were asking whether Facebook underestimated its own platform's success as app counts exploded. Kottke's 'new AOL' framing — building on Scott Heiferman's post-launch observation — crystallizes the analogy: Facebook, like AOL before it, is becoming the front door through which ordinary users reach applications and content.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers now compete for distribution inside Facebook's gate rather than on the open web — the confirmed disruption to the startup world means apps live or die by Facebook's approval and feed placement.
- AOL itself is repositioning on the same turf: its test of an overhauled news portal, drawing design cues from popular blogs, targets the same habitual homepage audience Facebook now captures.
Second-order effects
- LinkedIn faces a direct incursion as Facebook's rapid growth pulls professional networking inside the same wall — the platform model lets Facebook absorb adjacent use cases rather than cede them to specialists.
- Yahoo and AOL, which have already failed to steer significant TV ad budgets toward their portals despite courting upfront buyers directly, now confront a rival that aggregates consumer attention natively instead of selling it.
Third-order effects
- If the AOL analogy holds, the consumer web re-fragments into gated platforms where the owner controls identity, distribution, and monetization for every third party — commentary already argues Facebook should be read as an enterprise play, extending the gate beyond consumers.
- The durable question the comparison raises is whether developer ecosystems flourish under a single gatekeeper or eventually demand openness — the same tension AOL faced when the web outside grew faster than its garden.
The trend: The consumer internet is re-centralizing around gated platforms that own the user relationship and rent access to developers — the portal model reborn on top of a social graph.