I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
One of AOL's biggest assets is its brand. For people over 30 and, due to AOL Instant Messenger, even a lot of people under 30, AOL was their first real interaction with technology in a positive way.
I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.
The Gmail app is definitely the app I use the most. I am always running from meeting to meeting, so it keeps me up-to-date with everything going on. I actually e-mail more often from my iPhone than my laptop, so having a nicely designed e-mail app is really important.
It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.
I'm so computer illiterate, I barely know how to send an e-mail. I mean, I have a laptop and Gmail, but I don't really look at it much.
Prior to email, our private correspondence was secured by a government institution called the postal service. Today, we trust AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, or Gmail with our private utterances.
I still go to a party and say something embarrassing to someone, and then write them a weird e-mail about it the next day, and then write them a text because I think they didn't get the e-mail. No matter what happens with your level of success, you still have to deal with all the baggage that is yourself.
Email is a senior citizen. It's been around since at least the 1960s in one form or another. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a hot competition among consumer email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.
No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.
I am definitely a keep-it-clean type of person when it comes to e-mail. My 'important' folder on the Gmail app is constantly clean. When a new e-mail comes in to my important folder, I immediately look at it and determine what action item comes with it. The action item may not get done until later, but at least I know it's coming.
AOL, I think, represented an opportunity for a few things. One is I'm a big believer in the AOL brand, and I think AOL as a brand has touched hundreds of millions of people around the world. Reigniting that brand is a very exciting challenge and a big opportunity.
Even if you take someone like RuPaul, no matter what she does, people are still going to find something they don't like about her. You just can't win.
A big part of fixing AOL is getting AOL to believe in itself.
I've learned the idea of pausing when agitated or doubtful. I can still write the e-mail but instead of sending that e-mail to the person I'm in a fight with, more often than not these days, I just delete it. Or I run it by someone else that I trust before I send it. And then I usually laugh at the e-mail and how funny it is.