America Online brings My AOL

America Online testing personalized homepage for users

AOL is the latest to join the bandwagon to provide personalized content on the homepage of their web portal as per user’s own preferences. All the major search engines and web portals provide some sort of personalization for their users. Google let their user modify the various sections on their Google news homepage, Yahoo! Offer custom news feeds on their search pages and MSN lets the user change content to his/her preference on the MSN Homage. Even Netscape provides similar facilities to their users.

AOL would now be letting users put RSS feeds of their choice of web sources on their AOL personalized homepages. My AOL is what it is called now and they have collaborated with Feed Aggregating website Feedster to provide the functionality to the end users. Feedster is n RSS search engine with some 12 million searchable, indexed feeds and it would now help AOL users to find and subscribe to content matching their interests.

The My AOL section would then automatically retrieves updated headlines from an array of news and entertainment Web sites and offers users the ability to add their own. In the coming days, AOL would allow users to search these RSS Feeds for content of their choice enabling them to get access to the latest news and updates on the web.

AOL spokesperson Jaymelina Esmele said in a statement: “We are making it easier for consumers to collect and organize information they want from the Web using RSS.” As per web analysts, personalization of web content on the popular websites is going to be a major way, these portals can attract more users and keep them on their website for as long as possible. With the diversified nature of the web so complex, it becomes convenient for the user to get access to content relevant to a variety of fields at a single place.