SOMEWHAT FRANK

Goodbye Aol. Hello Entrepreneurship In 2010!

This year my New Year's resolution is to be bold and what better way to do that than to start the year off by leaving the solid paycheck, benefits and comfort of a job at Aol. Today is my last day as an Aol employee as I have decided to move on to pursue some of my own entrepreneurial endeavors. It has been just over 3 years since I joined Aol to help bring some "Web 2.0 & social media" perspective and expertise to the Aol team. In Internet years that is about 10 years. My first task was to join the product development team responsible for the myAOL triple threat including a personalized homepage, a feed reader with bookmarking and an innovate recommendation engine. We then went on to launch it in 28+ countries before it turned one. More recently with the launch of AIM Lifestream I saw about 18 months of planning and strategy come to fruition which included work on AIM buddyupdates and the acquisition of SocialThing. I have racked up a lot of airline miles bouncing between DC and the West Coast. It has been a good run and a great learning experience working in a large organization and I have met so many great people along the way. I am proud of our accomplishments at Aol. As anyone who has ever worked at a large company can attest, it is not easy to launch a product in a big organization and I did it a few times in just three years. 

What will I be doing? 

Purdue Fast Track News: Social Media Interview

via youtube.com

During my Purdue University a few weeks ago that I previously mentioned, I was interviewed by Purdue's student run news network Fast Track News. Check out the well done video interview by Bram Wahl where I share social media insight and explain the new AIM product. This is just the minute and a half story that will air soon.

New AIM with Lifestream Launches

Since joining AOL in 2006, I have worked on the product direction and strategy of two AOL products. The first of these was the myAOL personalized start page, which I covered previously when it launched in 2007 and was rolled out to 78 countries. The other product I have worked on is AIM.

AIM has been around a very long time - launched in the 1990’s it assembled the first viable social graph with the AOL buddy list. So I was excited to jump on board with a team of internal AOL thought-leaders in January 2008 to map out the future of myAOL and determine how it could interact with AIM to offer users a streamlined social utility. During this process we identified that real-time data or the “lifestream”, is a necessity to any social experience on the Web. AIM had a similar "lifestream" concept since 2005 called AIM Buddy Updates which I covered previously, as we relaunched it on the Web in the summer 2008. We concluded our work and learnings from the project and proposed a direction and then went on to acquire SocialThing, which I connected with AOL via TECH cocktail Boulder 1 to join the AIM team and contributed to the effort. Being involved from its original ideation till now, I am pleased to see the new AIM with lifestream come to fruition.

iPhone Push Notifications Tested Via AOL's AIM

Apple will soon be launching of the iPhone 3.0 operating system and part of the new system is a push alert notification feature as highlighted at WWDC 2009 this week. Push Notification is the system developed by Apple to remedy the fact that the iPhone won’t allow third party applications to run in the background due to security, battery life and performance concerns. Push notifications are will enable certain tasks (like IMs) that come to your phone even when that application isn’t running.

TechCrunch recently tested Push Notifications using AIM the new 3.0 iPhone software. Watch the video above to see Push Notification in action with AIM but please note the video makes it seem like there may be a delay between an IM sent and received, but it’s basically instantaneous.