AOL has been in the news quite a bit lately. And none of this publicity has been good. It seems every move AOL has made lately has made matters go from bad to worse.

AOL’s First Mistake: Waiting too long to hop on the broadband wagon. Sure, AOL came out with their broadband service, but it was no match for faster connections such as cable. Is this AOL’s fault? Yes and no. It’s not AOL’s fault that emerging companies such as Comcast have come out with a better service. But you would think with all the money that Time Warner had that AOL would be able to see these newer faster connections emerging.

Customer Service: AOL has been known to have very bad customer service, especially when customer’s try to cancel their existing AOL plan. In a video shown here, an AOL customer Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account. The customer service representative haggled him for a few minutes as he tried to cancel his account. Other people have also had this problem. AOL figures they will give their customers a hard time when they try to cancel their accounts. Does AOL think people won’t talk to their friends? I know if I tried to cancel my account and I was haggled, I’d let everyone I knew know about it. What will a person think when they go to sign up for AOL and hear horror stories like this?

AOL set to become a freebie. In a bid to regain customers, AOL recently announced it would become a free internet service. AOL then announced they will be cutting 5,000 jobs from their American branch of 19,000. AOL must be hurting. Then AOL came up with the brilliant plan that they would give away email addresses with personalized domains. So instead of being joeshmoe@aol.com, you could be joe@shmoe.com. Later on you will be able to host your own webpage with that domain. One of the conditions of this are that AOL owns the domain. Sure this is a service no other company offers, but will it be enough to attract new customers?

When you thought AOL couldn’t get any worse, they went and amazed us all. AOL released the records of searches of over 500,000 users over the course of 3 months. AOL has since taken the database down and appologized, but the jig was up. People saved the database which is now circulating around the internet. You can search the database here.

After the records were released and people did a little searching, the results were sickening. User927.txt courtesy of consumerist.com, shows User 927 searches for flowers, then rape porn, then dance steps. I’d feel much better if I never knew about user 927. Then you have the case of user 4417749. Now although AOL replaced all the usernames with numbers, user 4417749, better known as Thelma Arnold, was easily found when combining a few of her searches. I wonder if any lawsuits will emerge from AOL’s folly. There is bound to be one out of 500,000 or so people that want to take a bite out of AOL.

Some would say Time-Warner’s acquisition of AOL is the reason for a lot of their problems. I personally believe they should have been able to have done a better job since being acquired. Will all of these tactics be enough for AOL to regain customers? Will AOL be able to shift its business into something else such as advertising? Or is this the beginning of the fall of an internet giant?