Despite the splashiness of AOL 8.0's launch -- it will be unveiled at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, at a "star-studded" bash hosted by Dana Carvey and featuring Alanis Morissette -- the software does not look, to an outsider, like anything other than your standard AOL. AOL's trademark cartoonish look-and-feel remains the same, and the service's various sections and subsections will be familiar to most users. But John Kaufeld, the author of "AOL for Dummies," says that he's been using 8.0 for several months, and "it's the first software that I've seen in probably four years that I'm excited about."

AOL 8.0 allows users to customize several aspects of the service, such as the colors of the desktop, or to choose one of six versions of a "Welcome Screen" they'd like to be greeted by when they sign on. To experienced computer users, that may seem like trivial stuff, but Kaufeld says that to AOL users, those changes will be very big news. "You could argue, well, dang, it's not that impressive -- there was one Welcome Screen and now there are six," Kaufeld says. "But culturally, that's freakin' huge. AOL tends to operate under the Mercedes-Benz approach: 'We have figured out the best way to present information to you. Why would you want to change it?' With 8.0, they're saying, 'Maybe you would enjoy having some choice.'"

Of all the changes in 8.0, Kaufeld particularly likes AOL's improvements to e-mail. AOL has long been criticized for being spammy. Maybe an AOL address signals a certain lack of sophistication that appeals to bulk e-mailers, or maybe the sheer number of AOL members makes them a good target market; in any case, AOLers are often flooded with unsolicited e-mail. To reduce it, "the mail client now looks at your address book to see if you know the person mailing you, and it displays a different icon if you know the person," Kaufeld says. "When you send an e-mail, it automatically adds that person to your known-person list, and they've added a sorting tool to quickly show you e-mail from only people you know."

Several new features in AOL 8.0 are designed to improve what Jeff Kimball, AOL's vice president of product marketing, calls the "community aspects" of AOL. One utility quickly finds others who share your interests to chat with, and another allows people who are talking to each other to listen to the same song at the same time. "I'm not sending you a file that you listen to later," Kimball says, describing the service. "I'm getting you right now, while we talk. I know you like the Stones, and you're in my life, and as we listen to the song I say, 'Remember the time we went to the concert three years ago?'"

AOL has made much of its renewed focus on features meant to improve the user experience rather than the bottom line. AOL's CEO often mentions that the hallways in company's Dulles, Va., headquarters are plastered with signs that say "Members rule!" Such reminders are a good idea, because many who follow AOL, both inside and outside the company, agree that for a while, members did not enjoy such exalted status.

Depending on whom you speak to, you'll hear either that AOL lost its way very early in the Internet age -- around 1995, when the company first began experiencing exponential growth rates -- or late in the game, right before the dot-com bust. AOL says it happened more recently. Ted Leonsis, the vice chairman, candidly told BusinessWeek that AOL's "last two product releases -- 6.0 and 7.0 -- were primarily driven by how we can create inventory to run ads and how we can bring [magazine] subscriptions to our partners at [Time Warner]."

But AOL veterans say that money corrupted the company earlier. In his book "AOL by George!" George Thornally, who ran AOL's Mac forum when the company had fewer than a hundred thousand users, writes of how the company was slowly infiltrated by business school grads who didn't know how to run an online service.

In a stream-of-consciousness narrative that at times degenerates into a meandering ramble, Thornally paints early AOL as the kind of friendly, high-minded place that few people associate with the company today. In his remembrance, AOL was a place where people argued weighty issues, where the most personal of problems were discussed without much interference from AOL execs, and where the discussion forums reigned supreme.

"We made America Online," Thornally says of his forums, "and they didn't bother us. The analogy is the actors and the front office in Hollywood. The front office runs the business, but the actors make a studio. People come to see the actors. And that's how we were in the forums on AOL."

But in the mid-'90s, when Thornally's contract was up and he went to renegotiate, the bottom-line-conscious management refused to re-sign him. AOL seemed to be forgetting its community.

"They really lost touch with it," Kaufeld says. "People were doing screwy things that turned into more of a focus on, How can we sell our customers' 'eyeballs'? Everything was sponsored. Borders brings you this, Pep Boys brings you that. At some point all of the discussion boards started getting moved off to one side. They got shoved into an area organizationally where it made no sense. They changed it so that if you were in the autos channel, you get all kinds of branded, sponsored content, and the autos forum would have been moved off into a whole different area, sort of the Siberia of the online world. When they did that they killed a lot of the community side, because -- I can just see some MBA grad saying this -- 'Community doesn't really pay.'"

Still, subscribers stuck with AOL, and more people and then more people signed on. In the late '90s, AOL's growth rate was extraordinary. "There's this hallway at their headquarters where they have the milestones marked on the wall," says Gary Arlen, the president of Arlen Communications, an interactive media research firm in Bethesda, Md. "It's amazing -- it takes like six months to go from 10 to 11 million, but six weeks to go from 21 to 22 million. At one point in the late '90s, AOL was adding a million people a month."

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