Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers

Silicon Valley Sightings: AOL

June 21st, 2007 | Category: Silicon Valley Sightings, Web Industry

An omen?

Not sure what happened to this AOL van, but it looks stalled.

This is the company we rarely hear about anymore, what are they up to lately? I’ve a few friends that used to work there or still do, some expressed to me it’s very corporate and innovation is difficult to get moving. What has AOL done to stay relevant in today’s 2.0 space? Google has done tremendous work and is one of the platforms for mashups and is deeply rooted in many areas, Yahoo has delicious, flickr, upcoming, pipes, mybloglog, the brickhouse. Ask.com is gunning a huge rebranding advertising campaign that confuses many, but what has AOL done since Jason Calacanis has left?

If you know of current AOL innovation (or even work there) please leave a comment. Heck, if it’s really interesting I’ll swing by and video it for the Web Strategy Show.

Update: Frank Gruber and Jen came over to PodTech to show me the new MyAOL, I take back what I said, AOL is innovating. While certainly not cutting edge, they are making strides in the right direction.

8 Comments so far

  1. Jim Long June 21st, 2007 12:56 pm

    oh, i know! they just made their web mail (which i scarcely use) much, much slower! ;-)

  2. Neil Ford June 21st, 2007 12:59 pm

    Ficlets - http://ficlets.com/

    I’d suggest having a chat with Kevin Lawver (kplawver@twitter) about what he and his team are up to.

    - Neil.

  3. Mike June 21st, 2007 1:11 pm

    No fair. I was just coming over because I noticed that Ficlets had the AIM logo today.

  4. Adam Snider June 22nd, 2007 1:37 pm

    The last time I heard about AOL doing anything at all was when the ripped off Yahoo’s homepage design. Not exactly innovative. Nothing else springs to mind.

  5. jeremiah_owyang June 22nd, 2007 3:17 pm

    I forgot that Frank Gruber recently joined AOL, he’s a friend. I consider that innovative, so there’s one sign

    http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2007/06/new_myaol_is_co.html

  6. Frank Gruber June 24th, 2007 11:42 am

    Yep, I am product manager for a new product called myAOL which is more than just an Ajax personalized homepage…it is suite of products which includes a content discovery and recommendations engine and a slick feed reader and bookmarking product. I demoed myAOL at the Supernova gala on Thursday night and got lots of great feedback. It is coming soon so I hope people give the new myAOL a whirl.

  7. jeremiah_owyang June 24th, 2007 6:29 pm

    Frank, I look forward to the demo!

  8. Web Strategy by Jeremiah » The A-List Bloggers Dilemma June 25th, 2007 4:03 pm

    […] Frank Gruber is coming over here in a few minutes, he’s going to show us MyAOL, I’ve been ranting that AOL is not innovative, they’re like a stalled bus, Frank may prove me wrong. […]

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