Michael Arrington of TechCrunch today reports on a new beta version of the AOL portal.
Sadly, there is nothing innovative here - the whole thing looks exactly like the Yahoo! portal. Now I guess one could argue that Yahoo has found the holy grail of portals, but isn’t there somewhere where AOL could innovate?
I think Arrington is making one mistake though, when he ends his review with he following:
The company needs a category killer to get some street cred.
They don’t. Their audience doesn’t care about street cred. Hell, a large part of the AOL audience might not even know Yahoo exists. AOL is doing what it needs to do for the customers it has. If this redesign is popular with AOL’s users, then good for them.
There is a short flash tour of the new version available on AOL.com (via Somewhat Frank). The exciting new features are that you can pick your color, customize the home page and have it better fit your screen with one easy click.
Wow - am I underwhelmed, but then, I guess I am not really in AOL’s demo…
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