New York — AOL.com, the web portal of America Online, on Thursday rolled out a revamped homepage available that it hopes will become a hub of sorts for Internet travelers by letting consumers access multiple social networking services directly from AOL.com, becoming the first major portal to offer direct access to information from major social networking sites, email accounts and more without switching from site to site.
Officials said that this follows the move a month after AOL.com, the number four gateway to the web after Google, MSN and Yahoo, offered access to multiple e-mail services from the AOL.com site, being part of AOL’s continuing approach to open its homepage, to outside services and content — offering consumers more customization options.
With “My Networks” the new social networking feature of the site, users would be able to access information from their Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, AIM and Twitter accounts instantly from the homepage and send a status update to all of them simultaneously.
“As the Web becomes more divided, consumers crave for choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming.
AOL said that the affect has already being felt, pointing to the September figures from comScore Media Metrix. Traffic to AOL.com is up 34 percent in September year over year; uniques are up 3.2 million, or 11 percent; and total minutes are up 40 percent.
The number of people choosing AOL.com as their homepage increased by 500,000; according to internal stats. “Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com. We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com,” Wilson said.
Wilson also said that AOL has recorded over one million cases of users “hovering” over the Yahoo Mail panel on AOL.com daily to either sign-in for the first time or preview Yahoo Mail. Of those, a full 15 percent go directly to Yahoo Mail from the preview panel to compose mail. Similarly, we are seeing over 400,000 instances a day of users hovering over the Gmail panel on aol.com.”
Echoing rival Yahoo!’s strategy, users will also be able to build customized collections of news sources that push new content to AOL in real time via RSS feeds.
AOL.com also announced new tools and features to further personalize the user experience, blending together third-party content and services from across the Internet. As part of this redesign, AOL’s digital advertising business Platform A, and AOL.com are offering more robust capabilities for advertisers including customized wallpapers, increased rich media capabilities, much deeper and richer content integration opportunities and more. For example, a recent one-day advertisement for a new DVD provided a chance for the advertiser to own the AOL.com homepage wallpaper for the day to reach consumers in a highly customizable and measurable way.
The latest front page also includes an RSS reader via the Sphere acquisition and a new local module powered by acquisition Relegence (real-time local news as well as weather, gas prices, lottery numbers.) Entering the name of a US city or zip code provides a feed of local news and weather. Another feature, “Themes,” offers users the possibility of personalizing the homepage by choosing a color or backdrop of their own design.
“Leveraging our acquisitions of Sphere to distribute associated articles and content in the RSS Reader, and Relegence to power local news stories will improve our current offering and serve to bring consumers a differentiated experience,” added Wilson.
Other additions include the ability to add external bookmarks at the top of the page and to change AOL’s own navigation lineup through drag and drop, but users can switch to the classic version if they prefer.
The changes to AOL.com advance AOL’s overall programming strategy of focusing on passion points to create vertical websites to lean into the increasing fragmentation of the Web as users access multiple sites to get information that is most relevant and useful to their daily lives.
AOL, a subsidiary of media giant Time Warner Inc. was a powerful player in the early days of the Internet but has lost ground since then and is trying to recast itself as a popular one-stop portal.