There was a curious article in the New York Times this week. The journalist was writing out of honest confusion. He had heard that AOL was adding some new features to its home page, and wanted to ask his readers if any of them cared. Even a little bit.

See, this world we call “interactive media” is a funny place where empires rise and fall with the predictability of the seasons. There was a time when America Online was called the “goliath among Internet service providers.” Admitting you weren’t on AOL was like admitting you didn’t have indoor plumbing. AOL’s base of almost 30 million dial-up users made their service synonymous with “the Internet” for the better part of the 1990s.

But even though AOL was a kind of perfect solution to the WEB 1.0 world, it fell flat on its face as newer alternatives were brought to market. All of a sudden, internet users didn’t want online hand holding. They wanted freedom, options, media, and speed. Oh, how they wanted speed. Now, in this world of broadband access and wireless hotspots, the AOL many of us depended on for internet access is basically obsolete. Obsolete?!? How did this happen?

What AOL was among the last to appreciate is that, unlike print or broadcast, interactive media has yet to develop any sense of heritage. Small innovations aside, a book is still a book and a 30-minute sitcom is still a 30-minute sitcom. But we love interactive media for what it can do today that it couldn’t do yesterday, and we have little patience for it when it doesn’t evolve fast enough.

Anyway, the author of the article in question did get a handful of replies from people who still use AOL. Predictably, they were mostly baby boomers who only use the internet to check their email and use their cell phones “for phone calls and nothing more.” Like AOL, this kind of internet user probably won’t exist in a generation. And, for that matter, neither will the internet as we know and love it today.

With all that said, I should probably mention that Meyer & Wallis’ interactive team spends a lot of time each day playing with and discussing the emerging interactive technologies you won’t even know about until next year. Our commitment to our clients is to understand this stuff better than anyone, and to understand it in the greater context of a comprehensive creative marketing strategy across all possible media. You owe it to your customers to stay current on the means available to you to interact with consumers. Like never before, they expect this of you, and see it as a measure of your company’s relevance to them. If you last looked at your company's website before FaceBook and YouTube existed (only a couple years ago), chances are it's collecting some virtual dust. Don’t believe me? Don't know what FaceBook is? Hey – you aren’t reading this on AOL, are you?

Read the NY Times article here.