THE FALL AND RISE OF THE “ONLINE SERVICE”

September 1966
by A. Anthony Citrano, III

This column started off as a grand prediction about the downfall of the proprietary online service. For months I’ve been wanting to write a column about how CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy were going to go away, or be fundamentally redefined. However, the recent news of new subscriptions dropping dramatically at CompuServe, and with many of their managers heading for the doors, it would seem no longer timely. I prefer to predict the future (or try) instead of using current news stories as fodder. In this case, the curse of “web years” has made me pay a price for my tardiness. Therefore, I’ll take this news and pontificate on what I think it all means for the next couple of years.

The proprietary online service, as we knew it in the late eighties and early nineties, is dead. I’ve been a loyal subscriber to one of the big ones for 10 years, and this year was the first time I ever thought of canceling. I just can’t figure out why I need it. Absolutely everything I need has moved out onto the Web. Even the big online services are moving there, and trying to figure out how to market themselves and profit there, instead of inside their own virtual “shells”. I don't believe that they have figured it out yet; but that's only partially their fault, as the web hasn't figured itself out yet.

No longer can an online service company assume that subscribers will come to them for their content. There’s too much freely available content on the Web. In the last six months, I’ve never been able to find a piece of information using my proprietary online provider that I couldn’t find on the Web. As security continues to improve, I also become more confident in doing business over the Web. This decreases further my need for proprietary service.

How can these service providers respond to the changes in our dynamic Web world to convert this into an opportunity? They must redefine their companies rapidly. They must not try to fight the current. There are a few things the online service community did well for many years. They should take these and reshape them a bit, then market them as internet tools. The perfect example is the “agent”.

A couple of years ago when I was doing some consulting for a political candidate I came across a great feature Compuserve had called the “Executive News Service”. It basically was an agent that watched all the news wires for you for keywords. Not really context, but content. It occurred to me that when this technology matured (and we’re getting there) we would be able to launch little guys like that to do our digging for us. The agent would do this searching very well, and it would understand context as well as content. It would no longer sit still inside Compuserve’s (or anyone else’s) bowels and wait for the information to cross its own field of vision. It would sprout wings (or legs) and go find it and bring it back to you.

In all of this confusion, in this massive shakeout, the old “online service” becomes something else. It truly becomes a service. It wakes up. It becomes real and alive. It is no longer a middleman; it is now your eyes and ears 24 hours a day, every day. As you sleep it works for you.

Now, the flip side of this is that the Web itself is dying. As my friend (and now, fellow Mainer) Bob Metcalfe has been proclaiming, the internet is being crushed to death under its own weight, and the weight of the selfishness of those who erect networks that, while attached to the internet for their own convenience, do not participate in the kind of bandwidth sharing and openness that has helped the internet grow.

Can we solve both of these problems? I think filtering will address both issues to some degree. First, it gives the online service company a chance to be “reborn” because they will (if they know what’s good for them) focus their energies on developing components for individuals, that, for a monthly fee, can be launched for them and all Web pages and news articles that seem relevant could be directed, as links, to the individual’s own e-mail box. Unnecessary cruising could be eliminated because your virtual agent, while you were off mountain biking at Acadia, found the pages that you needed (perhaps before you knew you needed them) and delivered them to your desktop. That’s the new meaning of online service -- not the act of charging someone to reach the net, but charging someone to make the net effective and efficient for them.

It also will reduce the amount of traffic on the network because raw browsing will be drastically reduced. Wait time will be reduced, and performance will improve considerably. Of course, this might irritate Web advertisers, because (unfortunately) a lot of them depend on “wanderers” to come across their ad on a web page while the user is passing through, looking for something else. Sometime soon, we’ll need to talk about new ways to advertise inside these agents.

This technology is not limited to the home consumer at all. The business applications for these services will be enormous. Corporations can use these services to watch their competitors 24 hours a day, they can use them to monitor stock markets overseas while they are sleeping, they can even teach them to conduct business while their staff is occupied or long asleep.

The hope for survival for yesterday’s online services and today’s software developers is collaborative filtering agents, services and software related to these agents that help the net help people and companies do their business more effectively. Our move into an information economy has changed the face of business forever. Things happen in seconds that used to take months. Companies must not be afraid to fundamentally redesign themselves overnight in response to a changing world. Well, the online service has changed dramatically, and the providers must do the same to survive.

Copyright 1996 - A. Anthony Citrano, III 1017 Words; First Serial Rights Granted to Cybernews / Cybertown

About the author:

A. Anthony Citrano, III is the former owner of Advantage Consulting Group in Portland, Maine and founder and former President of 3D Millennium Publishing of Portland, Maine, one of the first companies in the world to publish an electronic magazine on the Internet's World Wide Web. Over the years, he has appeared in national and local media as an expert on computers, telecommunications, the internet, and computer network security.

You can get more information on him by clicking here.

He loves getting e-mail from readers at: anthony@vrbazaar.com.