AOL's New Look--And Philosophy

The remnants of AOL's walled garden are about to come down, but could the company become the No. 1 destination for Internet users once again? AOL yesterday released the first part of a home page redesign, which allows users to access their Yahoo! Mail and GMail accounts right from the AOL homepage. The new AOL also offers a Hotmail option, but only as a link to the Hotmail landing page. "We'd love to give you access to Hotmail also but unfortunately, Microsoft does not provide us the ability for you to access your account via AOL.com," AOL's Sanjay Nayar said in a blog post. If you're not interested in those options, you can also add standard AOL fare like Radio, TMZ, AIM, and so on.

Now this may not sound like much of a revolution, but AOL is the only major Internet portal to explicitly promote the use of third-party services under its own brand so far. True, you can add almost any e-mail account to your iGoogle page, but there is a big difference between having it all there by default versus trying to hunt down the right gadget for your profile. We should also see options to access the major social networks and an RSS Reader on AOL.com in October, according to TechCrunch.

AOL had about 111 million unique visitors in July, according to Comscore, placing it just behind Google, Yahoo! and MSN. AOL has always been a popular destination, especially for the office crowd, because of its short news items at the top of the page and its penchant for celebrity gossip. And fourth place is nothing to sneeze at, but clearly AOL is looking to streak ahead. If you haven't been to AOL in a while, the new features make it worth a second look.

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