In an effort to draw more consumers and advertisers, Time Warner Inc.'s Internet services group AOL has  refashioned its homepage to pull in information from third party sites including email previews from Google and Yahoo, as part of the company's plans unveiled Wednesday for returning its portal to the heights it once occupied. AOL also introduced specialty Web sites focusing on women, parents of children who play video games and fans of popular culture. AOL Bringing Outside Email Access To Its Portal With New Program The changes, which were to be rolled out in their entirety over the next two months, were aimed at giving users of AOL "more consumer choice and customization," the most prominent being a new "every email" addition that let AOL users preview their email from other Web-based mail services beginning Wednesday. While the email service does not let AOL users read or reply to their third party email directly from the AOL portal, it makes linking to and logging into outside email providers' sites a simple task. "The preview panel only allows for a preview of the message. When you click on it, you will be taken to the actual message on the provider's service where you will be able to reply, forward, or delete just as you normally would," AOL said. The new AOL homepage will let users add Web links and access RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds from sites like Twitter, while giving advertisers access to a greater variety of photo and video ad placement  options, the company said. Some industry analysts expect AOL to begin implementing some of the social networking feed technology used by SocialThing, a company it purchased earlier this year. "With the launch of mail aggregation, AOL will be the first among the big traditional portals to offer a centralized email experience," AOL executive vice president of programming Bill Wilson said Wednesday in an announcement. "We know that consumers today have multiple email accounts on different services to keep tabs on daily, and we want to make it easier for them. This is an important first step in opening up AOL.com and giving users the ability to populate the AOL.com homepage with content and services they use on a daily basis, regardless of where it lives," Wilson said of the changes. Content From Facebook, MySpace and Its Own Bebo To Feature In Redesign Next month AOL plans to begin using a portion of its portal to let users read the status updates of their online friends at social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and its own property Bebo, which it acquired earlier this year for $850 million. Bebo is the third largest social networking site and a Web property AOL has struggled to integrate with its main portal. AOL told users Wednesday that it needed to "become more of a launch pad to your other online experiences," and said that to move in that direction it had implemented the new email features, which it said could also be replaced by those without third party email accounts with other options including "Music, Radio, TMZ, eBay, and more," according to a message announcing the changes posted Wednesday on the company blog by AOL's Sanjay Nayar. Other new additions to the AOL main page will come from its other Web properties including fashion site StyleList, parenting site ParentDish, personal finance site Wallet Pop and men's lifestyle site Asylum, the company said. The new AOL portal email system, which the company said was added due to frequent requests from users, included links to Hotmail, although it said that Microsoft "does not provide us the ability" to access its popular Hotmail email site directly from the new AOL site, instead including the link to request that the functionality be added by the Redmond, Washington-based software maker. "For a portal to be relevant to consumers today, it has to recognize that users seek a variety of different experiences and connections with their various networks and information sources," Wilson said. "AOL is embracing this with the new AOL.com, becoming the first truly open portal experience offered by one of the big traditional portals," he added in the Wednesday launch announcement. AOL Seeks To Improve Portal With More Third Party Content Wednesday's changes were another in a series of moves aimed at shifting the company's focus from being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to an Internet advertising and content provider, and follow a restructuring plan that saw April layoffs of some 100 people. Last month Time Warner announced that it planned to slice AOL in two by  early 2009, separating the unit's digital advertising business from its beleaguered dial-up access endeavor, a move seen as a possible precursor to an eventual sale of either of the two as Time Warner regroups with an increased focus on its media properties. Estimates have placed the value of AOL's traditional dial-up business at some $3.7 billion and its digital advertising properties at roughly $10.1 billion, according to a February Sanford C. Bernstein study, which found that fewer than 35 percent of people using AOL were also subscribers. AOL's traditional dial-up Internet access service lost 740,000 customers during the fourth quarter of last year, and saw sales fall 32 percent. Since the giant $112 billion merger of Time Warner and AOL in 2001, the firm's strength has largely rested on the shoulders of only two groups, cable television and AOL. Time Warner's Cable is the industry's second biggest cable service, trailing only Comcast. Related Links:
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10:26 pm on Sep. 10, 2008 (utc 0)