14 DAY TRIAL // America Online today announced the initial beta release of My AOL, a new personalized home page on the AOL.com Web portal. The new AOL.com portal provides users with the flexibility to access and use the portal based on their specific needs and interests. In addition to a centralized page that provides a view of AOL.com's entire suite of features and its new Video Hub experience, the portal also provides a personal "My AOL" page for consumers who want fast access to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for updates of news and content they care about.
AOL has teamed up with Feedster, a leading RSS search engine, to provide the capability for My AOL users to search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds that relate to their interests. Drawing from sources across the Web, the new My AOL will provide users with up-to-the minute articles and information on the subjects that matter most to the user and presents this content in a simple, streamlined and organized format.
With the tremendous volume of information available on the Web and the constant rate at which it changes, My AOL utilizes the best technology available to simplify the process of gathering and organizing important news feeds so that they will be quickly and easily available to the user.
Feedster's proprietary technology platform crawls the Web continuously fetching updated posts and RSS feeds. This enables delivery of a fresh index of information from millions of sources more frequently than traditional search engines. As a result, Feedster has the largest index of RSS feeds. It leads the market today with a rapidly growing searchable index of over 11 million RSS feeds and hundreds of millions of XML documents.
With My AOL, each user decides what's important and can sign up for RSS feeds that relate to their personal interests. From one organized page, they'll be able to stay up-to-date on everything from established news sources to popular blogs and more, virtually any site that offers an RSS feed. Features of the new My AOL personalized page include:
- A "My Feeds" section which retrieves updated headlines from favorite Web sites. Users can select from a pre-set list of categories - from national news, business news and politics to entertainment, sports news, technology and humor - as well as add their own feed-based content to their personal My AOL page.
- The ability to easily add RSS feeds manually by entering RSS/XML addresses or URLs for favorite Web sites. My AOL will automatically scan these Web sites for all available feeds.
Other features that will be added soon include:
- The ability to easily search the Web for additional RSS feeds.
- A "Top Feeds" section that will display Top News and Hot Blogs from across the Web.
- The ability for users to access their My AOL page from any computer by exporting their settings.
The initial beta version of the new My AOL page is available today from a "My AOL" Tab on the new AOL.com portal at http://startpage.aol.com/beta.adp. Additional features will be incorporated over the coming weeks.