There is a notable thread of AOL history that is missing from the article:
- At one time, most AOL users had an online "profile" hosted by the AOL Hometown service. When AOL Hometown was discontinued, users had to create a new profile on Bebo. This was an unsuccessful attempt to create a social network that would compete with Facebook. When the value of Bebo decreased to a tiny fraction of the $850 million AOL paid for it, users were forced to recreate their profiles yet again, on a new service called "AOL Lifestream."
- AOL took the decision to shut down Lifestream on 24 February 2017, and gave users one month's notice to save off photos and videos that had been uploaded to Lifestream.[1] Following the shutdown, AOL no longer provides any option for hosting user profiles.
- During the Hometown/Bebo/Lifestream era, a user's profile could be displayed by clicking the "Buddy Info" button in the AOL Desktop software. After the shutdown of Lifestream, clicking "Buddy Info" does something that provides no information whatsoever about the selected buddy: it causes the AIM home page (www.aim.com) to be displayed.
This information should probably go into the Criticism section, because each of these "forced migrations," culminating in the complete termination of user profiles in 2017, contributed to the disgruntlement of AOL's user base. 75.163.201.149 (talk)
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