Who's Got Sex?
(Via Hit & Run) Michael Wolff detects that Emperor AOL is garment challenged:

You've Got Sex
Or rather, dear America Online, you had it. But as the suits at Time Warner prudishly looked away, you squandered your lead as the nation's leading purveyor of dirty chat.

The theatrical effort to revive America Online is not just a business soap opera but one of those great, almost poignant instances of the culture going one way and a heroic, albeit oddly out-of-it, ragtag group thinking it can hold fast against the tide.

Here's the real rub: AOL's fundamental business -- which has always been a level or two down from the family-oriented opening screen -- is dirty talk. But now there are better places to talk dirty.

The big attraction of AOL through all of its growth years has been not just ease but easy prurience. Its real selling point was that you could buy something perfectly respectable and get something very dirty -- it was the ultimate brown paper bag. In fact, the more respectable it got -- building up a critical mass of American families (women too!) -- the dirtier, and more compelling, it became.
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Meanwhile, the AOL guys were refining their story. A great American brand could not appear to be in the sex business. So what AOL focused on was getting the dirty-talk audience to buy things. From sex to commerce was the conversion it was attempting (this is the conversion that cable television managed with infomercials in the mid-eighties). Certainly, Time Warner believed in conversion (the people at AOL used the word community as a euphemism, but the people at Time Warner used the word for real -- as though imagining little shops and churches and schools).
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In contrast to the new, slick, and easy-to-use hookup sites, AOL has started to look like a bus station.

Aside from the "training wheels for the Internet" aspect, I always thought this was AOL's big attraction. Wolff smudges the picture a little bit by hauling in for comparison what seem to be fairly legitimate dating sites, but the punchline remains:

What's more, the matchmaking business is growing in a way, and producing profits of a sort, not seen since the advent of eBay (among the largest dating businesses is Barry Diller's match.com).
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Everybody with any speed is locating and targeting and qualifying possible mates with great ease in well-designed, mall-like settings, while back at AOL, it's still a creepy, anonymous, low-class world.

Hey, it's got to be a powerful trend if even the Taliban is doing it.

I must be getting old - the big event for meeting "eligibles" used to be the weekend square dance.