There are a few other lightweight bits of personalization, like a display of local news for people who have entered their ZIP codes. And it will also soon bring together news feeds from Facebook, Twitter and MySpaceĪs well as AOL’s own Bebo social network. The mail module now will display Yahoo Mail and Google’s Gmail in addition to AOL’s mail. To my mind, the most interesting aspect is how AOL offers to aggregate some This sounds grand, but this year’s batch of improvements, which will be added to the site over several weeks, are hardly revolutionary. “What we really wanted to do was lean into the fragmentation of the Web and makeĪOL.com more open and relevant to users.”

“The portal model, although hugely successful for us and Yahoo and MSN, is an antiquated model,” Mr. Wilson isn’t ready to admit defeat, and he promises big changes. I wonder whether AOL.com is like “The CBS Evening News” - an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling. 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. And AOL.com mainly serves former AOL customers who still choose to keep their AOL e-mail addresses. Now, of course, AOL’s Internet access service is a shell of its former self. AOL’s home screen was the town square of the Internet, and changes were closely watched. 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. Hey, Bits readers, I need your help: Does anyone out there use AOL.com (or the home screen of the AOL software) for anything? Why? And do you want any changes from it?

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