Introduction to MyAOL and Mgnet

by Kevin Farnham
November 29, 2007

AOL was a one-stop portal where internet users in the dial-up age could find pretty much everything they wanted to find. The internet has grown and changed in so many ways since the 1990s. The Web is so huge that the problem users face today is finding, organizing, and managing the content that interests them. Not only is there too much information available, but most people also have email accounts, screen names, identities on multiple social networking sites, subscriptions to blogs, and so on.

AOL's MyAOL provides a structure for organizing an individual's online activity, making it more manageable. Meanwhile, the related Mgnet provides automated intelligence to help people find new content on the Web that will likely be of interest.

Getting Started with MyAOL

When you go to MyAOL for the first time, you are presented with a page that has three tabs (myPage, Mgnet, and Favorites) and an announcement that says you can have:

Your own myAOL page in just 2 steps.
Create a personalized page with everything you want and nothing you don't - all in one place.

All you have to do is click the Get Started button.

Scanning the page, you see a well-organized layout that includes:

• AOL Directory Links
• Top News Headlines
• AOL Video Search (Truveo)
• AOL Mail
• AOL Public Galleries (from AOL Pictures)
• Sticky Note
• An advertisement
• Weather forecast
• Tmz.com (an AOL news site)

Two steps sounded easy enough to me, so I clicked the Get Started button. I was asked to enter my zip code:

Figure 1. MyAOL Get Started step 1: zip code request

Next I was presented with a list of 24 types of "stuff" I could add to my page (categorized as News, Tools, Entertainment, and Fun Stuff). I clicked a bunch of checkboxes:

Figure 2. MyAOL Get Started step 2: cool stuff selections. (click the image for a larger version)

Clicking Next brought me to my own customized MyAOL page.

MyAOL myPage Page Organization

The login page for MyAOL (you log in using your AOL/AIM screen name) includes this celebratory introduction to MyAOL myPage:

Start the day with your personalized home page and check on the pulse of the world according to you. How do we know you'll like it? Because YOU set it up. Nice job!

That's a pretty accurate statement of what MyAOL's myPage tab provides. You can select from 24 basic types of application, and most of these applications can be configured to suit your own personal tastes, needs, desires, whatever.

If you are familiar at all with AIM Pages (an application/site that I found very impressive), you'll readily note that MyAOL includes the same type of drag-and-drop page design features that were pioneered in AIM Pages. Each "cool stuff" item is enclosed in a box that acts like a floating window. For example, here's my Top News Headlines box:

Figure 3. MyAOL Top News Headlines box

The top bar provides the following options for managing the box and its embedded application:

• Arrow on the left: Minimize the box, or return it to being displayed.
• X on the right: Delete the application from your page.
• "options": Click this to open a set of options for configuring the application; different applications have different sets of options.
• Other areas on the top bar: move the box (left-click and hold the bar, and then drag the box to its new location).

Clicking "options" for the Top News Headlines application lets you configure your feed. You can select a different feed URL, change the title, change the number of items displayed, and change the layout (selecting Headlines or "Headlines and Summaries").

Figure 4. Configure the MyAOL Top News Headlines application

Other applications provide the expected options. For example, if I log into my AOL Mail account, I have an option to select how many messages from my Inbox I'd like to display. The AOL Pictures application's options let me select viewing pictures from a specific members public gallery or pictures with a specific tag; and I can select to see a grid of pictures or a single image. Here's one of the pages that resulted when I chose to see a grid of pictures tagged "chihuahua" (you can scroll to other pages using the arrow buttons):

Figure 5. AOL Pictures application after selecting pictures tagged "chihuahua"

Aren't they cute?!

More MyAOL myPage Applications

Don't think you are limited to just 24 types of applications. Click Add Content at the upper left of your myPage tab, and you'll see a "Browse the entire collection" link. This brings you to a page where you can select from hundreds of applications that are currently available for MyAOL. Not only are AOL's own applications supported, but widgets such as Google Gadgets and groovy YourMinis can also be integrated into your MyAOL myPage tab.

All in all, the MyAOL myPage tab provides a highly flexible, easy-to-use method for, in essence, constructing your own customized home page.

Mgnet: A New Kind of Search

The Mgnet tab on your MyAOL page opens up an entirely new web content search and organization capability. The MyAOL login page says this about Mgnet:

Discover cool content in a whole new way by getting personalized recommendations based on your likes and dislikes. Once you start using it, you won't want to stop.

"So then, isn't Mgnet really just a search engine?" you, being a tech-savvy person, may ask. Well, yes and no. It's fairly common knowledge that search engine technology remains deficient in many ways. Google's revolutionary idea of utilizing incoming links as an indicator of the relative importance of web pages is no longer new. While that led to improved search capability, it's still very difficult to find exactly what you're looking for using modern search engines. Meanwhile, the web itself continues to grow and grow, further exacerbating the problem every day.

Mgnet attempts to go further than what standard search offers, while also providing the user with an easily understandable user interface. Computers are now ubiquitous in homes--but that doesn't mean everyone's a techno-geek. AOL has maintained the tradition of making the online world conveniently accessible to average, non-technical people, a tradition that was the foundation of its original success. MyAOL and Mgnet are the latest examples of this commitment.

In his July 10, 2007 blog post "MyAOL Personalization Suite Launches," AOL's Frank Gruber (the MyAOL product manager) called Mgnet:

... an innovative and fun, visual content discovery and recommendations engine. Mgnet offers a visual approach (using image clouds) to finding new content that you might be interested in on the Web. ... Mgnet leverages Truveo and Sphere for robust offering of Web content.

Clicking on the Mgnet tab on your MyAOL page brings you to a set of 27 pictures that represent different topic areas. Hovering your mouse over a pictures brings up tooltip-like text that tells you in words what the image represents.

Figure 5. MyAOL Mgnet tab. (click the image for a larger version)

Mgnet Search Experiment

To find out what this is really about, I did some experimenting. What I immediately realized is that using Mgnet is nothing like using a search engine. With a search engine, you search for one thing at a time. But with Mgnet, you select a set of types of content you're interested in. So it's really a multifaceted search that covers a spectrum of your interests.

Of course, another major difference between using a search engine and using Mgnet is that Mgnet "remembers" what interests me; so the more I use Mgnet, the more relevant the results I can expect to receive, as Mgnet/MyAOL tailor their actions based on my previously stated preferences.

I selected World, "Business and Finance," Science, Gadgets, Pets, Football, and Baseball as my base selections. Clicking Next brought me an interesting selection of recommendations displayed as picture links and text feed links:

Figure 6. Mgnet results for my seven-category search. (click the image for a larger version)

Hovering over the pictures produces a text description of what the image represents. Clicking on a picture copies the picture to the right and returns a set of feed links related to that picture.

The "What Else Ya Got?" button brings you another set of picture and text feed links to items that are relevant to your search categories.

Favorites

If you click the Favorites tab, you'll see a page that collates the latest feeds from sites that will likely interest you. The MyAOL description of Favorites reads:

Save, organize, read, mix, and share your favorite RSS feeds and bookmarks for easy access from any computer on the Web. This is sure to become one of your favorite things.

The Feeds list is customizable. Thus, the Feeds section of the Favorites page provides you with a blog reader, eliminating the need to deploy a separate application such as BlogLines or BlogBridge. You can view titles and a brief text snippet, or titles only. Clicking on the title of a feed entry brings up the full article or post in a new browser tab or window.

The Bookmarks tab provides you with a flexible, customizable web page bookmarking tool.

Creating a New MyAOL Page

When you first start using MyAOL, you are provided with three default pages, accessible by the tabs:

• myPage
• Mgnet
• Favorites

But you are by no means limited to just those three pages on your MyAOL site. The Add Page button lets you create an entirely new page, which you can use for further organizing your online interests and activities. For example, you could create separate pages for personal and business purposes. Or perhaps your myPage tab has become too crowded, and you'd like to better organize your site by moving some of the applications from myPage to a new page.

Adding a new page is easy. Start out by clicking the Add Page icon. This brings up the default list of featured items that is displayed when you configure your myPage page. To give your new page/tab a name, click Tab Name at the top of your new tab. A text entry box will open, and you'll be able to enter the name you'd like for this tab/page.

From this point on, to configure your new page you follow exactly the same procedure as was described above for configuring your myPage page.

MyAOL: The Intelligence Factor

The How myAOL Works help page provides a hint of exactly what makes MyAOL different:

About myAOL

myAOL is about you and what you want to see and do on the Web. myAOL, including Mgnet and Favorites, will help you discover new content and websites that may be of interest to you.

You Click. We Learn. You Get More.

myAOL adds an additional layer of personalization to your AOL experience and will seek to deliver to you relevant content based on your activity on myAOL (for example, the articles you click to read or things you rate). To turn off this feature, visit Settings.

It Gets Better Over Time

The more you use myAOL, including Mgnet and Favorites, the better your recommendations will become. They may not always be spot on (we're still learning, too!) but every time you read an article or rate content, myAOL gets smarter and our recommendations should become more relevant and interesting to you. If you would like to start over, go to Settings.

Personalized Intelligence Fused with Web 2.0 Collective Intelligence

A defining characteristic of Web 2.0 is "harnessing collective intelligence." This is the concept that a Web 2.0 application gets better, becomes more useful, as more people use and interact with the application.

Mgnet pioneers a new way of making applications better and more useful over time. We might term this "personalized intelligence." Mgnet analyzes the choices the user makes over time, aggregates that information, and uses it to make better recommendations as it searches for and selects news and blog posts that may be of interest to the particular user.

Adding in the options in the Favorites tab to create bookmarklets and share them with your friends, and you end up with classic Web 2.0 harnessing of collective intelligence fused with the power of a personalized intelligence engine, something I don't think I've seen before.

Conclusion

MyAOL provides users with a new and convenient means for deploying their favorite web tools and managing the sites that interest them on the Web. For developers, MyAOL provides an opportunity to make your own widget or web application available to the tens of millions of users who have a AOL/AIM screen name.

For developers, MyAOL offers many opportunities. You can create your own applications, or develop widgets (Google Gadgets, groovy YourMinis) that can be applied by users in their own MyAOL pages. Before long, these opportunities will be extended through the Mgnet WidgetServer APIs, which are currently in development at AOL.

The internet has changed a lot since the days when people received America Online CDs in the mail, and could pop them into their computers and discover for the first time what this "internet" was all about. Then, users dialed up to a one-stop portal where they could find almost everything that was then available online.

Today, the Web is so large, so much is available, that finding what you really want to find, and organizing it all into a manageable structure, are people's biggest problems when it comes to the Web. MyAOL provides the tools that make this possible, while also enabling users to access it all through a single, highly configurable, Web destination: your MyAOL page.

References

• The home MyAOL site
• How myAOL Works: Overview of MyAOL features
• About myAOL: myAOL help page
• myPage Tour: Description of MyAOL myPage features
• Magnet Tour: Description of MyAOL Mgnet features
• Favorites Tour: Description of MyAOL Favorites features
• "MyAOL Personalization Suite Launches" by Frank Gruber, Somewhat Frank blog, July 10, 2007