Email…Gmail vs. AOL
It always is a bit surprising to me how many of my clients still use AOL for their email after all this time (and for example, have not switched to Gmail…. a far, far superior email service in every way)
This seems to be a common holdover from the time, many years ago now, when AOL was a huge internet presence; I guess they were the ‘Google of their day’. Remember back when AOL used to send out what must have been millions of CD’s, with a “Try AOL for Free” come-on? I remember I used to get one of these in the mail a few times a week, only to have to just throw them all out. Wow AOL, that was certainly not “green” at all by todays standards, huh? I saved a few for coasters, but what a waste.
To me AOL basically was the “internet made easy” and dumbed down a bit. AOL was aimed at people who needed a little hand-holding back then in the earlier days of the surge of the Internet. AOL supposedly made it “easy” to use the internet, or so they alledged, hence the famous “You’ve got Mail!” sound whenever you got new mail, like you really need to hear that 9 million times just to see you had a new email. OK the first time its cute but still cute the millionth time you heard it?
But the main thing was about AOL was most users didn’t understand AOL was a totally unneeded “middle-man” in the whole process. They were actually just standing between you and The Internet at large. You didnt need AOL to get on the internet…any browser (like Netscape at that time) could get you on the internet. AOL just SEEMED to make it a bit easier by adding cute little icons and dumbing things down a bit. But it REALLY slowed down one’s access with those tons of graphics thet had and that you would have to wait to load just to even start using thier software, especially on (what we would now call) really SLOW computers back in the day. Oh did I mention DIAL UP MODEMS which made every graphic just crawl to get downloaded? So all this made just getting online crawl when I used to use AOL. Funny thing is for a lot of people, they are just used to it now and can’t leave. Many even are unaware AOL stopped charging long ago (but they didnt really tell their users that).
Today AOL as an email provider is still quite mediocre. Their email system’s been plagued with problems over the years. Yet still – strangely to me at least – many many people have hung on to it for all of the above reasons and more.
In a nutshell of all the email providers I’ve tried, in my opinion Gmail is by far the best. I encourage all my clients to switch to Gmail. And no, they didn’t pay me to say that (yeah I wish).
Benefits? Gmail is FREE; they give you a HUGE amount of space; theres no graphics clutter and flashing logos distracting you like on AOL still (!); the small text ads they have you barely notice, plus so many other added features and benefits its not funny: online calender, free “office” software, Shared Google documents, etc, etc, etc… Should I add “of course, its Google”?
Well Google does know a tiny bit about the Internet don’t they, and by and large Google seems to generally just get things right. Me, once I tested out Gmail and started using it, I switched to it and never went back.
Here are a few tips on using Gmail which might be handy….
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/01/gmail-is-different-heres-what-you-need.html
