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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...?
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To: Zoltan! who wrote (3102)5/13/1997 6:35:00 PM
From: Art Stone   of 13594
 
Excite Inc. is set to launch a new online chat service on Monday.

I downloaded the software and checked it out.

Observations:
- Install didn't work correctly. I had to reinstall MSIE and then it worked.
- Sigup was painless - email password at least authenticates a valid email address
- About 1300 people online during prime time - roughly 2% of what AOL is supporting (guestimate)
- Like all other similar chat software, it really is unpolished (although getting better). Biggest annoyance is that there is no ability to set the font size. Pretty useless if you have any vision impairment or run with a high graphics resolution
- Avatars seem interesting at first, then become annoying
- So many users are chatting with no profile information at all that it feels even more anonymous than AOL - that "foxy chick" avatar in all likelihood is neither.
- Software hints at games, but there don't appear to be any
- Technical Support area is "Under Construction"

I assume Steve Case is still on Excite's board, which makes me wonder about the motivation for providing this service (beyond the possibilty of ad revenue). My working theory is that a reasonable chat alternative may move off some of AOL's heaviest chatters to ISPs, and will free up those modems.
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