AIM Pages Not Quite Ready to Kill MySpace, or Anything

AOL launched its MySpace killer last week and after using it for just a short time — mostly because there wasn’t much of anything you can do at this point — I have to say I’m less than impressed. AIM Pages more resembles something from 1996 than 2006, even the AJAX edit mode does little to make this a beta worth playing with at this point. AOL has a nice advantage in the fact they have a huge userbase for its messenger. Get all those people to create an AIM Page and MySpace will look like the worst $500 million ever spent.

To be fair, MySpace isn’t the most wonderful site either and its success is as much luck and being at the right place at the right time, more than anything. However, MySpace gives the kids what they want in a social networking site — figure that out and make your own gazillion — and lets them customize how their personal page looks — which in my mind currently seems to be the killer feature that people want. At this point, it looks like AOL is taking the packaged theme route rather than doing what MySpace has done and allows you to style your pages by altering the CSS. In the long run, I don’t think that will work for them but I noticed that people are creating custom modules so, perhaps, they’ll open the themes up to the public as well. If that’s the case, then I’d say they at least have a fair chance of making it an interesting fight.

The thing AIM Pages has going for it that MySpace doesn’t, are the modules and even they need a little work. The few I installed, end up making my AIM Page look like a fridge that has four different kids artwork hanging on it. It’s great that I can select a theme and use whatever modules I want, but when the modules not only clash with the themes but with each other, you’re sure to upset people striving for a nice looking page. Of course, if you’ve ever taken a look at what some MySpace users think is a good, readable design, you can’t really fault AOL too much if all the modules appear to have been designed by separate people who don’t talk to each other.

I think MySpace could easily get squashed by a new player (look at how quickly Friendster lost its users to MySpace) but just like gaining rank in the search engines, somebody is going to have to provide a better product if they hope to gain the type of market share that MySpace currently has. The thing is, “better” could really mean anything. Because if you ask me, I’d say Friendster has a much nicer look and user experience than MySpace. I really have to believe somebody is going to come up with something sooner than later that steals the thunder from MySpace, I’m not quite sure that it will be AOL though.