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.
