HuffPo Thinks AOL-Bashing Is HILARIOUS!

Remember when AOL spent $315 million to "acquire" the Huffington Post and then allowed Arianna Huffington to wring as much of the AOLness out of the enterprise as humanly possible?

Well, that image above is kind of a fascinating postscript. It's a HuffPo article by Dean Praetorius collecting what he called the "some of the better reactions from across Twitter (the social network that landed the Congressman in hot water to begin with), including some more comical responses." He refers to Rep. Anthony Weiner's bizarro press conference yesterday, of course.

Now, Praetorious' efforts clearly didn't reach much beyond his own Twitter feed, as the 14 "better" and "more comical" responses he selected are entirely made up of tweets from prominent media sources. They include such brilliant, insightful zingers as these:


So he didn't try very hard or feel like looking, even, through the #weinergate hashtag for actually funny or clever remarks.

But what's more telling is the one Praetorius evidently found the funniest and made sure would be displayed first for readers. It's this:


Yeah, I'm a little defensive because I, too, still use AOL email. And, yeah, I'm mildly irritated whenever I run into any email problem that I reference here or on Twitter or our podcasts and hear from the world how uncool and passe that is. You know, as if Gmail never goes down, right? I guess I've never understood why one email system is better or worse than another or how somebody's preference confers upon the user any credibility as a tech-savvy human. I've had 11 different real addresses and seven different phone numbers since I created my AOL account in 1994; it seemed to me that keeping just one means of being contacted that doesn't change is a sensible way of being reachable.

Oh! One more thing! Rand Getlin, the clever fellow who tweeted that? He's not really one to talk. He's a reporter, after all, for that au courant search engine, Yahoo!