Blogosphere Takes Notice of AOL Drive to Open Technologies

The developer community and broader media - from Techcrunch to the New York Times - is increasingly taking notice of AOL's drive to open technologies. Developer blogging site Techcrunch drew out the significance of AOL's rollout of a new Webmail product that includes a set of plugins that allow users to quickly access current news topics as well as third party services, most notably Yahoo Mail: "The move is another step in AOL's attempt to prove that it is no longer a walled garden."

In a separate post Techcrunch's Michael Arrington noted the impressive page views and revenue growth rates at Weblogs since AOL acquired the company in 2005. Weblogs has seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix. Since the acquisition, the Weblogs, Inc. blogs (which include Engadget, TMZ, Download Squad, TUAW, Joystiq, Autoblog and others) have grown from a U.S. audience of 1.4 million unique visitors and were generating about $6 million in revenue to 13 million uniques and revenues of about $30 million.

Techcrunch put AOL's opening to Yahoo Mail in context: "Historically portals have been reluctant to give users access to their messages on other services, but they have been recently been opening up (which makes sense, given that they want to be a one-stop hub for all of your internet needs). Last month AOL gave users access to both their Yahoo and Gmail accounts from its homepage, and is now integrating the features into its main webmail client."

In another development, the New York Times has picked up the news on AOL's launch of a "new developer site for MyAOL to almost no fanfare, but at a time when some are declaring the Facebook platform 'dead' - AOL's new platform warrants some serious attention." The Times' featured the development on its "Inside Technology" page under the headline: "AOL Quietly Launches One of the World's Biggest App Platforms." Their analysis reached the conclusion that the news was a great opportunity: "The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity."

It's no secret to readers of http://dev.aol.com that AOL has been passionately committed over the past few years to breaking with its history and opening its technologies to developers, but now this effort is gaining increasing recognition and traction in the broader community.