AOL Settlement Check Arrives, Man Lands on Mars

Wow. Oh Wow. Never thought I would see the day but there it was in today's mail. A nice, reasonably fat, back settlement check courtesy of the lawsuit against AOL for refusing to pay its chathosts and for a while there, not even giving them a break on the monthly fee, I was writing the other day about the early days of the internet and how it will make for a fascinating study or story someday at some point. A big party of that story was the exponential growth of AOL from 1995-2000 fueled by its chatrooms and chathosts.

I was a chat host and chat supervisor on AOL for at least two years. I forget exactly how long it was. I worked for a room called The Hub which was sponsored by New Line Cinema. The HUB featured personalities like Live Girl, the wonderfully snarky Lynn Snowden and the first public appearances of Carmen Electra, along with publicity for upcoming movies and discussion on a wide, hip range of topics. The HUB developed a solid following and I still have distant friends from those days that I talk to. My supervisor was Sarah Gilbert Fox, who is now living and working in Baltimore. She has a twitter site called Style Ave. After a couple years, I followed Sarah to Bonjour Paris, a new content site on AOL which eventually transferred itself to the web and still exists today, although without a chat room.

The chat rooms really did drive traffic to AOL. My first stop was the Writers Club where I mingled with a group of personalities which sometimes included Tom Clancy, William DeVault became the Romantic Poet of the Internet here and is still my friend on Facebook and Twitter. A number of people migrated from Writers Club to the Hub and when the Hub eventually closed, it was something of a shock.

It was fun and quasi-cutting edge at the time but AOL never ponied up a dime to its hosts. There was an elaborate host training system and hosts had real responsibility for showing up to cover shifts. Supervisors also had real responsibilty to see that hosts did cover shifts for their content areas, It was real work performed in real time. Somebody finally sued AOL on behalf of the chathosts and years later, we get a settlement check, I am thrilled and so grateful to Kelly Hallissey, Paul Greenberg and Rust Consulting for pulling this off. I suppose I should send my warm regards to Steve Case also for setting up AOL from its original Commodore 64 platform. We'll never know how much money AOL made in those years, but we know it was enough to try and buy Time Warner.

People like Josh Harris and Steve Case, the entrepreneurs of the early internet have gone through hard times in recent years. Maybe it is karma payback, but I kind of feel they were also ultimately used and abused by the overall system. Josh Harris's story is well told by Ondi TImoner's recent documentary, We Live In Public. There are many more stories to be told and when we can get perspective, maybe they will be told.