The holiday vacation brought me the family computer problems. One of the main issues was getting my father in-law out of the black hole known as AOL. I can rant for hours about how difficult they make it, it’s obvious they’re goal is to make it impossible. It’s obvious why, since the poor old grand/fathers will give up and stay.
Exporting Favorites:
Exporting your Address Book
Couldn’t find any solution that worked, so I was forced to use plaxo.com. I would never recommend plaxo but it’s pretty simple, just add a sync point export them in any format you’d like.
Exporting local E-mail
The program create an mbx that you can be used with Thunderbird, I used Thunderbird to import the email to gmail through an IMAP connection.
I just ended up copying these emails to a new folder under the gmail IMAP.
It took way to long but AOL has one less user and he’s FREE!!
Integrated chat is awesome and reply by chat is also a great addition. Only if they would use that partnership with AOL a little and get AIM involved with GTalk. But to review GMail I really can’t there’s just so many good things about it that the list would be too long..
I rarely use GTalk and I find myself only using it within GMail. Even though I have iChat setup for for GTalk I rarely use it and I’ve stopped turning it on because of that. As I said above, if they integrated AIM or AIM integrated GTalk like AIM currently does for .mac it would really take off and the voip portion might even be used.
Here is my page. With only 5 minutes of tinkering, AIM pages rocks Myspace. Designing the pages is extremely easy but don’t expect clean looking pages the flexibility still allows for the worst of designs, the designs we love to see at ms. The interface allows you to move “modules” around to design the layout, similar to Google pages, a couple that stood out were for YouTube and De.licio.us and I’d expect more since you can create your own and share them as “user created”.
As soon as AOL figures out the music solution for bands and whatever Myspace is good for I’d like to see Aim pages take over, it’s just seems that AOL is a better suitor for teen social networking then Fox’s myspace.
AIM Pages looks to be a real “Myspace killer”.
Two reasons:
1. Parents don’t mind the name because AOL is already known as family friendly.
2. The pages don’t look like crap. … Read More »
May 09
I look at AOL as a great resource for those older grandpas and grandmas who have no clue. They can log in and there email is there with a great portal of web links and pretty pictures for them to click on. But are they making it too easy?
Today I needed to help a middle aged woman just get to AOL. She had no idea how a URL worked and that you could just type in AOL.com in the web browser, press enter and it would take you to the AOL. Wow.
Is AOL enabling these people to become total computer noobs or is it user error?
I wish I had 3 more people to help. And yes it does work.
Here’s a good cheat if your not already working on it. Netscape or Aol is one of the choices for purchase. You need a credit card to do this. Just have your friend sign up there, wait for the green…
…light to show in about a day, then wait a week and call them to cancel the membership. That person will never get charged and the green light remains in effect! Try it out! Here is a the link; FREEiPODS.
