rogerd - 1:21 pm on Apr 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Interesting. I use AOL IM, and they recently went in the reverse direction with their little popup news & entertainment window that (by default) launches when you start IM. Because IM auto-launches on my office PC, that popup is one of the first things I see, & I'd often click on an interesting news link or two. Not long ago, it started demanding an AOL login for the news items. After this happened a couple of times, I stopped clicking on them, and was thinking about changing my settings to suppress the window entirely, as its utility was now compromised. I have to believe this experience was repeated by many, many thousands of users, and would send a clear message to AOL.