It’s been roughly 18 months since the last major change to the entry to AOL.com. Now, after revamping its verticals and launching new products like women’s site Lemondrop, AOL is trying a new approach to its portal entry: creating an info hub for third-party email services and social nets while integrating RSS, local news and pop-out “engagement modules.”
The first phase went live tonight with an e-mail module allowing users to check on AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail accounts from the top right-hand of AOL.com and expanded left-hand navigation to various points within AOL. Over the next few weeks, AOL will add an innovative global status update for major social services—write your status once and it shows up on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter at the same time—and the ability to follow multiple social net activity through one module from AOL’s front page. Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of programming, walked me through the new front page.
The changes don’t stop with e-mail and social nets. Some are skin deep as AOL introduces new color schemes and a more stylish approach, swapping muted pastels for options that include black backgrounds. (Screenshot here.) It may sound purely cosmetic but it gives the portal a new look and feel even tough the basic structure remains the same. On the top left, people can add their own links. AOL Radio will get a top spot. AOL.com also will incorporate “engagement modules” or pop-up players for video, photo galleries, polls and the like that can be moved to other locations on the page to watch video while reading email or the like.
It is an insanely long page but Wilson insists that their click maps show users scroll “if you provide value in the middle of the page as well as the bottom.” Much more detail after the jump.
More on e-mail
Hovering over an e-mail service after login shows the latest messages; composing messages or viewing all mail in an account takes the user off the page. Microsoft’s Hotmail poses a problem though; it can’t be accessed or previewed through AOL.com so AOL is providing a link that can be inserted in one of the module email slots—and a link to Microsoft feedback so people can ask for the feature. In addition to being more open, AOL hopes the e-mail aggregation will help recapture some of the user attention it lost before people leaving the ISP were allowed to keep their AOL addresses. Make it possible for Yahoo e-mail users to scan their inbox from AOL.com and they may stick around.
Leveraging acquisitions
Some of the new content on the front page comes from integrating AOL’s acquisitions. For instance, local news, something AOL hasn’t highlighted before, will be powered by Relegence, the financial news and info technology firm acquired by AOL in late 2006. Relegence, which pulls news and info from more than 3,000 sources, is already powering AOL’s finance, sports and entertainment coverage. Wilson says the portal avoided local news until now because news from nearby big cities tended to overwhelm the result. AOL will use Relegence to provide real-time news pegged to zip codes: “We’re really going to lean into local here.”
– An RSS reader in a module at the bottom will start default categories but can be supplemented by user choices. Recent acquisition Sphere will provide related content from the web; it was integrated quietly into AOL News last week and will be launched across AOL’s network.
Personalization not the goal
Wilson: “We’re not trying to create a replacement for myAOL or iGoogle or My Yahoo. … Based on our experience, personalized sites range usually to under 20 percent of the mainstream. If you look at My Yahoo, it does 20 million where My Yahoo does 90 millions; myAOL is roughly 8 million where our portal is about 48 million. Here, we’re trying to create an experience of great scale for the masses.” Beginning in Q109, though, the front page will start to respond to use. “If you as a user never click on finance news, we would swap that module out and provide you a different module based on things you do click on.” For instance, someone who clicks on style but not finance might get a style feed.
– The e-mail aggregator, social net module and other new features will be available eventually for myAOL.
Advertising
AOL is keeping the 300×600 display ad introduced for the Olympics and is testing placement for sponsored link ads from another acquisition, Quigo. The ads currently are integrated in various modules but the new look has them bundled together on the bottom left. “We’re constantly working with Quigo to determine the best placement for monetization but also leveraging that with the consumer experience.” The engagement modules “are all going to be highly customized from a sponsorship standpoint with rich media. We’ve been sharing that with TV networks and movie studios and some of the CPG as well as retailers.” That’s new advertising in the middle of the screen that doesn’t exist today. Will it pay off in revenue? The inventory being added should provide a boost.
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Posted in Design, Google, Internet, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
A web browser that gave many people their first experience of the web is set to disappear.
Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said.
In the mid-1990s, as the commercial web began to take off, the browser was used by more than 90% of people online.
Its market share has since slipped to just 0.6% as other browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox have eroded its user base.
The company recommends that users upgrade their browser to either Firefox or Flock, which are both built on the same underlying technologies as Navigator.
“I think we represent the hope that was of Netscape,” Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation which coordinates development of Firefox, told BBC News.
“We have picked up many of the things that Netscape launched but we’ve taken them further in terms of openness and public participation.”
Ms Baker was one of the first employees at Netscape in 1994.
Web window
Netscape was created by Marc Andreessen who as a student had co-authored Mosaic, the first popular web browser.
His company Netscape Communications Corporation released the first version in 1994.
According to Shawn Hardin, President and CEO of Flock, Netscape played an important role in making the internet “a relevant mass market phenomenon”.
“Netscape had a critical role in taking all of these zeros and ones – this very academic and technical environment – and giving it a graphical user interface where an average person could come online and consume information,” he told BBC News.
“During its halcyon days it really felt like the internet and Netscape were really the same thing,” he said.
Other companies capitalised on Netscape’s success, notably Microsoft, which began to bundle IE with its Windows operating systems.
Although this led to legal wrangles over anti-competitive behaviour, IE now dominates the browser landscape with an 80% market share.
As a result, Netscape became unviable.
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” said Tom Drapeau on the Netscape blog last year, when the demise of the browser was first announced.
Future return?
For the past week Netscape users have been shown a message alerting them to the end of support for the browser.
“Given AOL’s current business focus, support for Netscape browsers will be discontinued as of March 1st, 2008,” the message reads.
It then suggests users upgrade to either Flock or Firefox.
Firefox is the main competitor to IE, particularly in Europe where it has a 28% market share, according to some statistics.
The open source browser’s development is coordinated by the Mozilla foundation, set up by Netscape staff made redundant in 2003.
It has had more than 500 million downloads worldwide and in countries such as Finland it is the most popular browser.
“Competition is what brings quality,” said Ms Baker.
Flock describes itself as “the social web browser” and allows people to see feeds from community websites, such as Flickr and Facebook, and post to blogs without having to navigate to the page.
“There are lots of ways that people are engaging in having a conversation and Flock is very focused on making that as effortless and convenient as possible,” said Mr Hardin.
However, not all Netscape users are happy about having to change browser.
“I’m sad. Flock still needs improvement and I am not happy with Firefox’s interface. I’m [an] orphan!” read one post on the Netscape blog.
Others who posted comments on the blog predicted the browser will make a return.
“Netscape is a wonderful browser, and it will be so in the future,” read one.
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Posted in Internet, Software | 1 Comment »
AOL said on Wednesday it would buy Internet advertising technology company Quigo to bolster its ad force and make it more competitive with Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.
A source familiar with the matter said the purchase price was about $340 million. AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc, did not disclose financial terms.
The deal, which adds 100 employees, marks the last big acquisition AOL plans as part of a restructuring to transform itself into a one-stop online advertising shop, AOL Chief Executive Randy Falco told Reuters in an interview.
“I expect it to begin to add to growth in 2008,” he said, referring to AOL’s online advertising growth, which is a big concern among investors. Ad growth slipped to 16 percent in the second quarter and 13 percent in the third quarter, from 40 percent levels earlier.
Quigo, which signed a deal with Time Inc in June and has more than 500 publisher relationships, is an Internet ad-targeting company that lets advertisers buy sponsored listings, much like Google’s AdSense, based on keywords or subjects.
Advertisers have little say on where Google places their ads, but Quigo’s AdSonar product lets advertisers place their ads on specific Web pages, including pages featuring topics or keywords such as “mutual funds” or “health and science.”
The Quigo system also lets publishers control their relationship with advertisers, rather than surrender control to a middleman like Google.
Quigo gives AOL “access to a ton of relationships with a ton of premium publishers, thousands of advertisers and unique technologies,” Quigo CEO Michael Yavonditte told Reuters. Quigo has deals with TheStreet.com, News Corp’s FoxNews.com, and Walt Disney Co’s ESPN.com, among others.
SPIN-OFF?
The deal will add to Time Warner’s growing roster of online ad technology firms.
AOL restructured its advertising business in September, consolidating into one division ad network Advertising.com; Tacoda, which targets users based on their habits; wireless ad network Third Screen Media; video ads company Lightningcast; and ADTECH, a global ad-serving company.
Some investors have called on Time Warner to spin off all or part of AOL, with expectations growing after Jeffrey Bewkes was named earlier this week to succeed Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons on January 1.
Asked what he thought Time Warner’s view on AOL was, Falco said, “They just showed how they feel about our potential by supporting another big acquisition for us.”
The success of AOL is seen as critical to Time Warner’s sluggish stock price. The stock rose 1 percent to $18.54 following its third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, which largely met Wall Street expectations.
“AOL is picking up leading technologies — the premier names and smart people,” said Stan Sandberg, principal at boutique investment bank Gridley & Co LLC, which specializes in interactive marketing and digital media. Sandberg spoke on Tuesday ahead of the announcement on Quigo.
Sandberg added, “Now that it will be consolidated under Platform A, they really are positioned beautifully to being the leading advertising technology company.”
The deal for Quigo comes amid a buying frenzy in the interactive advertising market and follows Google’s $3.1 billion pact to buy DoubleClick and Microsoft Corp’s $6 billion agreement to buy aQuantive Inc.
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Posted in Acquisitions, Internet | No Comments »
