Webware

This morning AOL launched myAOL, a group of three services wrapped up into one customizable page. MyAOL is made up of three services: myPage, a customizable start page akin to Pageflakes or Netvibes; Mgnet--an audiovisual mashup of news; and Favorites--which for all intents and purposes is a Web-based RSS reader. All three offer various ways of browsing, reading, and discovering news and Web content.

Since most users are already familiar with the concepts of myPage and Favorites, the real surprise here is Mgnet. This is one of the cooler things I've seen lately, and somewhat similar to Google's recently released Google News image browser. Users can pick out topics they like or are interested in, and Mgnet will pull up a small array of images linked up with story headlines. Clicking one brings up the story description in a separate pane, and users are able to vote it up or down (a la Reddit) as well as see related news stories (which are powered by Sphere).

Pick your favorite topics from a simple mosaic of icons and Mgnet will serve up matching content.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In addition to providing stories it thinks you'll be interested in, Mgnet also keeps track of "what's hot," a small list of the most-clicked and voted-on stories. I found this more interesting than the actual AOL front page, since it's a little more visually stimulating. The one missing piece in this system is a way to see how user voting is affecting each story, something AOL will likely add later down the line.

Favorites is also impressive. As an RSS reader it's well-equipped. There's a fairly extensive listing of prepicked feeds from a variety of Web sites. There's also the option to add your own feeds, either with a straight RSS address, or by searching by URL. To keep track of your various feeds, you can set up folders, a little bit like Google Reader. You can also go in and reorder feeds with simple dragging and dropping. The one missing piece is a trashcan to delete feeds you don't want anymore, which instead is handled in a separate feeds manager.

AOL's got a pretty solid lineup of Web apps in one spot with myAOL. What it lacks in true originality, it makes up for in execution, as all three services are simple to use and feature-rich.

See more screens below.

Stickis is a new service that lets you attach little sticky-type notes to Web pages you visit and lets you view the notes other people have left on pages.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There was a service like this during the last Internet bubble. The product, ThirdVoice, was criticized as allowing "graffiti" on Web pages, since anyone's markups would be visible to any other ThirdVoice user. Stickis is different. The idea with this service is that you intentionally subscribe to various commentators (such as bloggers), then when you visit a site that one of these writers has a note on, it pops up on your screen. You can respond to their note with one of your own.

Bloggers can also add their feeds to Stickis, so every post they write automatically becomes a note linked to whatever sites they are linking to. Actually, anybody can do this for any blog. For instance, if there's an obscure political blogger you like, and you want to know when he writes about the stories you read on CNN, you can add his feed to your subscription list, and whenever he links to a story you're reading on CNN or any other site, you'll see a little alert pop up on the story page so that you can jump over to his blog and read the post.

I tried this with Webware.com (of course). It was simply a matter of giving Stickis the URL. Then when I went to sites I'd recently covered, such as WhoToTalkTo and LicketyShip, I got a note pointing me back to my posts. Pretty slick.

There are some user interface issues the site has to work through. For example, it's unclear how publishers will get the word out that they are writing Stickis content. In the beta I saw, I was automatically subscribed to several channels of content (all of them, I believe), and it was up to me to unsubscribe from the ones I didn't want. If Stickis takes off, opting out of new channels as they pop up won't be a satisfactory way to manage your content. Also, the Stickis plug-in is available for Internet Explorer only right now. [Update: the Firefox plug-in is done. See CEO Mark Meyer's comments to this post.]

But this is a really interesting idea. It links Web sites together by content automatically, sort of like Sphere and YooNo. And I love the idea of the portable expert: With Stickis, you can take your favorite bloggers with you wherever you go on the Net. That's just incredibly cool. The service could stand to lose some of its advanced features in the name of not confusing the heck out of its users, but the underlying idea is powerful.