Today myAOL, a personalization product suite, has officially been released to the beta. As the myAOL Product Manager, I feel like our team just gave birth to triplets, as myAOL offers up three applications into one integrated dashboard experience with various levels of personalization. We hope you like it.
I previewed myAOL a few weeks ago and now you can try it out for yourself. myAOL includes the following:
myAOL myPage is an Ajax, personalized homepage which offers applications and content to be your dashboard for the Web. It offers AOL content and applications (i.e. Truveo Video Search, AOL Mail, AOL Video, AOL Music, TMZ.com, etc.) in addition to 3rd party applications (i.e. eBay, Netflix, YouTube and many more coming soon). It offers a push down express widget tray, separate widget gallery, and drag and drop functionality to help make organizing your page a breeze. It also offers pre-configured,
Ready-made pages which makes adding pages full of content easier (e.g. news, celebrity, technology). With partnerships with Google and Goowy Media, myAOL will offer an assortment of Google Gadgets and Goowy yourminis among other 3rd party widgets.
myAOL Mgnet (pronounced “Magnet”) is an innovative and fun, visual content discovery and recommendations engine.
Mgnet offers a visual approach (using image clouds) to finding new content that you might be interested in on the Web. By using both collaborative filtering and active inputs to provide Web recommendations to users
Mgnet pulls in images and content (videos, articles, blogposts, podcasts, etc.) based on the user's likes and dislikes – users able to rate and save individual stories/feeds.
Mgnet leverages Truveo and Sphere for robust offering of Web content
Mgnet also displays “What’s hot” which taps into the hot items in the myAOL suite. Some additional social aspects will be integrated soon to make it easy to share your recommendations with your buddies.
myAOL Favorites is a combination feed reader & bookmarking product with a built in feed mashup creator (making easy to create your own feed mashups!).
Favorite's feed reader offers a robust and easy to use feed reader for fast content updates from your favorite sites with shortcut keys and previous/next buttons make it easier to get through a lot of content quickly.
Folders are setup for easy organization
Integrated bookmarking and sharing features
Import/Export feeds from other readers synched feeds via mobile. Bookmarks
are integrated with the feed reader experience making saving your favorite items a one-click process while reading your favorite feeds. Finally, one of my favorite features of the suite is "Mix & Share" within Favorites which allows you easily create a mashup feed which also renders as a page. You simply just added your favorite feeds or bookmarks to a folder then click the green "Mix & Share" button to see you options which include creating a public feed and page which can then can be leveraged in a widget, shared via email, AIM or AIM Share. This really makes creating mashup feeds easy and understandable to someone that may not understand everything about XML, RSS or feeds.
The entire myAOL team (dev, design, product, ops, qa, etc) has worked hard developing this personalization product suite, with some help from other groups at AOL and partners - thank you to all for the hard work and dedication. We hope you like the new myAOL and if you have any suggestions or feedback on something that you would like to see us add or change please let me know. Be sure to check out the myAOL Blog to stay updated on the latest happenings in the myAOL personalization suite.
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» myAOL Beta Launches and Flock .9 Released from Rajiv Doshi's Blog
1) myAOL beta launches today with three products: myAOL myPage, myAOL Mgnet, myAOL Favorites. The most interesting I believe is myAOL Mgnet which allows you to discover new content in a unique way. The myAOL myPage also brings customized start pages to... [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 10, 2007 2:45:31 PM
Wow, vast improvement. Great work on this.
Posted by: Ed Kohler | Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 01:39 PM
Congrats Frank and the AOL team on this, this is the type of innovation AOL needs to keep on delivering.
Posted by: Jeremiah Owyang | Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 06:51 PM
Yeah great job frank, really happy with how it looks. Still could use a stock portfolio add on application. But its still has some really really awesome innovations and its my new homepage.
Posted by: kyle | Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 11:25 PM
Congrats Frank....I know how hard you guys have been working...this is a great step for AOL. I look forward to additional progress!
Posted by: alex | Wednesday, July 11, 2007 at 08:40 AM
Congratulations on a job well done! You have worked hard on this for a long time, and it shows.
Posted by: Margo | Wednesday, July 11, 2007 at 12:50 PM