I noticed that AOL is publicly beta testing its own “my” portal service to compete with Google, Yahoo!, et al for users who like a customized home page. I have been using My Yahoo! for several years now just because I like my home page to be populated with rss feeds more than a simple Google search box. I use My Yahoo! to track my stocks, sports scores for specific teams, the weather, and several rss feeds that I feeds that I frequent. I’m not brand loyal and I’m not afraid to try new things, so I wanted to give myAOL a try to see if it offers more than My Yahoo! or presents the same things in a better layout.

Below is the default layout for myAOL. The colors and layout look crisp and, in my opinion, more modern than My Yahoo!.

None of the default modules (save Weather) were very appealing to me, so the first thing I did was remove everything and build my own from scratch. This usually means adding a bunch of rss feeds, but I looked through all the pre-made modules to see if there was anything useful. I ended up adding some nice widgets–a clean looking date widget and a sudoku widget. Additionally, I found some typical news feeds and added them.

One thing that was conspicuously absent from the built in options was a stock tracking widget or even the ordinary DJIA/S&P 500/NASDAQ charts (albeit, it is in beta testing, so I shouldn’t expect the world from it). The advertisement placement was very intrusive. I wish the service would pay attention to the My Yahoo! ad placement (above everything). I’ve included screen shots of the over-crowded page I made while I was playing with the myAOL service.

Top Portion:

Bottom Portion (Does that say Google Gadget?):

I have to mention that load times, while not obstructive, were noticeable. Users will become familiar with the following view for all widgets during the first several seconds of page loads:

In addition to a fully customizable page, users can choose from pre-made templates with set themes (these themes may also be customized). I think that these themes are representative of their respective topics and were pretty useful. Below are screen shots of the photo, technology, and video themes:

Photo:

Technology:

Video:

Finally, I want to discuss a unique (and I think the most interesting) feature of myAOL that I hope continues to be refined. Mgnet is a service that heuristically learns the type of content that users like and displays content that it believes will be of interest to the user. Mgnet does this by showing a panel of pictures. A user clicks on pictures and a list of related stories are displayed. The users clicks a thumbs-up or thumbs-down button next to stories to indicate a preference to Mgnet. I played with this for about a half hour and Mgnet was able to determine that I like electronics, video games, and football. It’s not a perfect system though; despite multiple thumbs-down for baseball, it continued to show baseball stories in my recommended reading panel.

I hate baseball:

I will be watching this product as it develops because I really like the potential offered in Mgnet and the layout is very appealing. I hope more financial widgets become available in the future and performance improves.

Give it a try.