Carl Hutzler's Blog

Our mail development team is part of a new organization called AOL Services Infrastructure. My boss, Sree Kotay, is really trying to get the leads from each of his new teams to get to know each other on a personal level. In our second onsite in the last couple of months, we really did get to know each other.

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As my boss mentioned on his blog the other day, AOL is opening up APIs to our applications in the spirit of Web 2.0 (whatever that means ;-). I came across an interesting article which examines whether this phenomenon is good for developers or maybe whether it is just good for the providers.

A year ago my wife, Rylan, got me to start exercising. She basically plunked down $500 for a dozen sessions with a personal trainer at our local YMCA. Since the money was spent, I figured I had to go.

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Yup. Its true. I tried it myself when I first saw the press release from the DearAOL group. AOL was not allowing the dearaol.com URL to be sent or received in any part of our system for a brief time yesterday. I could not even send it to myself which is how I tested it.

Thankfully the fix was straightforward and corrected immediately by our AntiSpam Operations team. The last thing AOL wants to do is live up to the picture the dearaol coalition has painted for us. We are not evil and would never block an organization for their views even if they are not flattering to dear AOL. We have strict policies on blocking URLs; anything else would be suicide. That said, mistakes do happen :-(

Its interesting to see all the conspiracy thoerists go wild with this one. I guess people really don’t trust AOL on this goodmail thing. But in my mind, this experience should serve as a positive for the dearaol group. I mean look how fast we corrected the mistake. This should give most everyone comfort that AOL can not run wild with goodmail and ‘block people who don’t pay’. Heck, if we did, not only would our members get frustrated and jump ship, but we certainly would not get away with it as proven today.

A team of AOLers made the trip to the big apple on Friday to take on our friends from Google, MSN, Roots Web, and Happy Core in a friendly game of dodgeball. While we did not take home the championship, we had a great time and did manage to beat Google in the “lusers round”.

If you ever play dodgeball, wear a cup and learn how to catch.

Pictures

Just some pix. I thought it was well done but agree with a few folks that sometimes the answers to the questions were not fully addressed. Granted some of the questions were hard ones, but isn’t that what its for? :-)

Pictures