Hey, Bits readers, I need your help: Does anyone out there use News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Local & Lifestyle - AOL (or the home screen of the AOL software) for anything? Why? And do you want any changes from it?
I’m asking this because I got a call late last week from Bill Wilson, the AOL executive vice president for programming, who wanted to talk about the latest improvements to AOL’s portal. A decade ago this would have been a big deal. AOL’s home screen was the town square of the Internet, and changes were closely watched.
Now, of course, AOL’s Internet access service is a shell of its former self. And News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Local & Lifestyle - AOL mainly serves former AOL customers who still choose to keep their AOL e-mail addresses. But Mr. Wilson claims that the site still attracts 48 million people, so AOL has an incentive to keep them as engaged as possible and to try to attract more users.
I wonder whether News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Local & Lifestyle - AOL is like “The CBS Evening News” — an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling.
Mr. Wilson isn’t ready to admit defeat, and he promises big changes.
“The portal model, although hugely successful for us and Yahoo and MSN, is an antiquated model,” Mr. Wilson said. “What we really wanted to do was lean into the fragmentation of the Web and make News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Local & Lifestyle - AOL more open and relevant to users.”
This sounds grand, but this year’s batch of improvements, which will be added to the site over several weeks, is hardly revolutionary. To my mind, the most interesting aspect is how AOL offers to aggregate some services from other companies. The mail module now will display Yahoo Mail and Google’s Gmail in addition to AOL’s mail. And it will also soon bring together news feeds from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace as well as AOL’s own Bebo social network.
There are a few other lightweight bits of personalization, like a display of local news for people who have entered their ZIP codes. And users can add their own links to the list of AOL sections on the navigation bar.
Curiously, there is a small module at the bottom of the page that can read RSS feeds. My instinct is that this is two orders of magnitude geekier than the typical AOL customer would want. When I asked Mr. Wilson about this, he conceded that there is only a small group of core AOL users who may want an RSS reader. But that doesn’t bother him.
“The play here is to attract a new audience,” he said. “This is more a move to attract an audience that may be using another RSS reader to come here and stay because there is another value.”
So I have one more question for Bits readers, who are much more interested in discussing Apple and Microsoft than AOL these days:
If you are the sort of person who would be interested in a site that would combine your e-mail, your social network updates and your RSS feeds, would you consider using it if the name was News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Local & Lifestyle - AOL?
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