AOL Hometown

AOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It offered 12 megabytes of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own websites, and included an own WYSIWYG online website builder called 1-2-3 Publish^[1][2] not requiring knowledge of HTML (AOLpress had been AOL's website builder before the introduction of AOL Hometown). In 2001, AOL Hometown estimatedly had 11 million websites^[3] and a new website was added to it every eight seconds.^[4] By 2002, AOL Hometown had grown to 14 million websites.^[5] It was shut down on 31 October 2008.

Its shutdown led to the creation of The Archive Team by one angered Jason Scott Sadofsky^[6][7][8] (commonly known as Jason Scott) which, with the help of the Internet Archive and other activist websites, saved as much of GeoCities as possible when it became the next "critical part of online history"^[6] and "important outlet for personal expression on the Web"^[9] to be shut down with short notice in October 2009.

History

Start date

Official online information as to when AOL Hometown started out are scarce. whois.pho.to gives a register date of "before Aug-1996" for the domain of hometown.aol.co.uk, however that probably relates rather to the basic AOL domain itself since the "domain name" to the registration is given as "aol.co.uk".^[10] First mention of AOL Hometown in a Google Scholar publication dates from 2000, which is Quick Guide to You'Ve Got Pictures, Aol Exclusive Version by D. Peal.^[11] Prior to that, AOL Hometown was mentioned in a Deseret News article on September 30, 1999.^[12]

Two tools for AOL Hometown still available on the internet suggest a start date of 1999 or before. The copyright notice to the AOL Hometown StatCounter reads "Copyright 1999-2011".^[13] The imprint to the download page of James S. Huggins's AOL Hometown easyDesigner says that it was "created: before Thu, 01.Nov.2001", and its copyright notice reads "© 1997-2011"^[14]

Less reliable information for the start date of AOL Hometown can be found in forum posts and weblogs of its former users, particularly after its shutdown:

• "I have an AOL Hometown website which I started in 1998."^[15]
• "Being an AOL user for more than 10 years, I considered [the shutdown notice] a bad joke, especially because there was no notice whatsoever on the AOL Hometown site itself, but the official AOL sites for USA and UK are confirming it now."^[16] (German post made in 2008, thus suggesting a date of 1998)
• "I've been with AOL ever since these homepages were available in 1998."^[17]
• "AOL Hometown: Their FTP is as screwed up [as] back when I tried it in 1997."^[18]
• "Like most everyone else here, I had my web site on AOL Hometown too. Mine was on since May, 1996. I've been a paying member since 1995."^[19]

Legacy sites

Over the time of its existence, AOL Hometown incorporated websites of formerly independent services acquired by or merged with AOL,^[6] including, but not limited to Ancestry.com,^[12] MyFamily.com, and Netscape,^[12] CompuServe,^[20] eAccess^[21][22] AcmeCity^[23] and others.

Therefore, it also contained an unknown number of websites that had been online for longer than the existence of AOL Hometown itself. On the German forum antispam.de, one poster complained in 2008 that with the shutdown of AOL Hometown, AOL had deleted his website that had remained on the internet "for more than 17 years" by then, that is, since at least 1991.^[24]

Criticisms of shutdown

"Well it looks like AOL did it again. Another sneaky move. The Hometown pages all seem to have disappeared. [...] I only discovered this morning that AOL pulled the plug on Oct 31st, 2008." - taimantis.com, November 11th, 2008^[25]

"Lots of information on AOL Hometown very important to people who put hard work into these efforts is being lost, possibly without notice." - David Dillard, "Meet the Googles" Visits the Grave Site of AOL Hometown to Ponder Its Past All to Short Life^[26]

"I was surprised to find that AOL just shut down their homepage service on Oct. 31st. There were many great websites created through that service that simply no longer exist." - Dr. Jitters, November 12, 2008^[27]

"I knew this was coming, I just didn't know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere. [...] I'm disappointed that AOL's turned its back on the community, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised." - Kevin Lawver, Ficlets Est Mort^[28]

"A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down.
[...] It's all fine and good, those readers who sneer and say 'you get what you pay for' and 'ha ha, losers'. But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child's hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. Some were absorbed from other companies as AOL purchased them. Some of these websites had existed for a decade. [...]
We're talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter." - Jason Scott, Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse^[6]

See also

• Comparison of free web hosting services
• GeoCities
• Wikia

External links

• Dillard, David (2008). "Meet the Googles" Visits the Grave Site of AOL Hometown to Ponder Its Past All to Short Life, Temple University, posted on Yahoo Groups, 18 November 2008
• Scott, Jason (2008). Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, December 21st, 2008
• Dr. Jitter (2008). AOL hometown shut down. Finding old sites., House of Jitters, November 12, 2008
• How To Retrieve Your AOL Files, November 11th, 2008
• AOL Hometown Users: Your files are *not* deleted yet – grab’m while you can!, November 24, 2008

References

1. ^ Hogan, Lynn (1995). Creating a Web Page Using AOL Hometown, Appendix C to the online book Practical Computing, published on Pearson Education
2. ^ Internet Baby Steps - Lesson 19: Creating a Simple AOL Home Page, Alexander Magazine, 2001
3. ^ Schau, Hope Jensen; Gilly, Mary C. (2003). We are what we post? Self-presentation in personal web space, Journal of Consumer Research, December 1, 2003
4. ^ Musgrove, Mike (2001). Free, easy site-hosting services tap into the urge to post, The Washington Post, January 28, 2001
5. ^ Hu, Jim (2002). AOL home page glitches irk users, CNET News, February 1, 2002
6. ^ ^{a b c d} Scott, Jason (2008). Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, December 21st, 2008
7. ^ Scott, Jason (2009). Datapocalypso!, January 5th, 2009
8. ^ Scott, Jason (2009). STAND BACK, WE’RE ARCHIVISTS, January 9th, 2009
9. ^ Internet Archive (2009).GeoCities Special Collection 2009: Saving a Historical Record of GeoCities
10. ^ [1]^{[dead link]}
11. ^ Google Scholar search result for "AOL Hometown"
12. ^ ^{a b c} Nii, Jenifer K. (1999). Family history Web site joins AOL, Deseret News, September 30, 1999
13. ^ StatCounter provides free customisable hit counters, visitor tracking and website stats for AOL Hometown^{[dead link]}
14. ^ Huggins, James S. (1997?). Using AOL Hometown easyDesigner
15. ^ fairchild (2005). AOL hometown website, webmasterworld, Jul 3, 2005
16. ^ "Was ich, als AOL-Nutzer seit über 10 Jahren, zuerst für einen üblen Scherz hielt, schon weil auf den AOL-Hometown-Seiten keinerlei Hinweis auftaucht, wird leider auch auf den AOL-Seiten für USA und UK bestätigt.", post by wasguggsuda, thread AOL Hometown weg - alle Astrobilder weg ("AOL Hometown gone - all our astronomy photos are gone"), on forum.astronomie.de, 07 October 2008
17. ^ "Seit 1998, also dem Bestehen dieser Seiten bin ich bei AOL." Breitbach, Elmar, PhD. (2008). AOL-Homepages sind weg ("AOL homepages are gone"), 5 December 2008
18. ^ electroJerm (2002). Free Websites, Jan 4, 2002
19. ^ typebar (2008). AOL shut down Hometown and members.aol.com/rrbp - why????, aolanswers.com
20. ^ "AOL-CompuServe deal cleared". CNET. 1997-11-10. http://www.news.com/AOL-CompuServe-deal-cleared/2100-1033_3-205177.html. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
21. ^ AOL Japan to transfer Net business to eAccess, The Japan Times, May 18, 2004,
22. ^ Matsuoka, Ken (2008). AOL Announcement: "AOL Hometown/FTP is closing 31st October 2008", 5 December 2008
23. ^ AcmeCity and AOL Hometown Collaboration, 2001
24. ^ "Immerhin hat AOL im Gegensatz zu manchen anderen Providern oder Gratisangeboten immerhin eine 'Haltbarkeit' von über 17 Jahren gehabt." ("Different from what other providers or free services would have given me, AOL gave my site a 'durability' of more than 17 years.") Chactory, thread Google warnt vor der gesamten AOL-Domain ("Google advises against all AOL domains"), 2 October 2008
25. ^ "How to retrieve your AOL files". Taimantis.com. http://www.taimantis.com/get-my-aol-files.html. Retrieved 2012-02-20. 
26. ^ Dillard, David (2008). "Meet the Googles" Visits the Grave Site of AOL Hometown to Ponder Its Past All to Short Life, Temple University, posted on Yahoo Groups, 18 November 2008
27. ^ AOL hometown shut down. Finding old sites., House of Jitters, November 12, 2008
28. ^ Lawver, Kevin (2008). Ficlets Est Mort