Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user's Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messenger. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they've been at this game for a year now.
Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming?
Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.
Yesterday's phishing attack in which several thousand Hotmail username and password combinations were leaked to the web now appears to be just the beginning of a massive phishing attack affecting users of multiple webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. The original list was posted anonymously on pastebin.com, a site generally used by developers sharing code snippets. Again, that site recently saw the addition 20,000 more login details from other webmail service providers, indicating what may the largest scale phishing attack to date.
AOL just announced AIM Lifestream. The service allows AIM users to check and update their Facebook, Twitter and AIM lifestreams from an AIM mobile and desktop dashboard. Users can send SMS and IM messages directly from the desktop and connect with friends across multiple platforms and using multiple mediums.
Today, AOL announced that they're deploying Socialthing for Websites across the company's network of 75+ MediaGlow web properties. The service transforms static sites into social web destinations by allowing visitors to share their experiences across other social properties like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and more. It also allows for real-time interactions while on the site, thanks to AIM and ICQ integration.
When Google radically changed its iGoogle homepage a little while ago, many of its users were up in arms about these changes. By updating its homepage today, AOL ran a similar risk, but instead of making radical changes to the design of the page, AOL managed to include a lot of new functionality on the new homepage without shocking its users with a completely new layout. The new features of the AOL homepage are mostly centered around adding support for third-party social networking services.
While there are many popular lifestreaming services out there such as FriendFeed and Profilactic, SocialThing! can be argued to be the more mainstream of them all, with a less geekier user interface and a more mainstream service focus. After snagging Bebo earlier this year, word spread that AOL was looking to buy SocialThing! Though it's only being confirmed again, we're wondering if lifestreaming is finally catching on to the mainstream masses.
SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL, TechCrunch reports. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days. As AOL product manager Frank Gruber reported, AOL also just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.
Last month we called AOL's Open AIM developer platform an "often over-looked social networking platform," but with 80 million users and plans to integrate the AOL Instant Messenger platform into bebo, it might not be over-looked for long -- in fact, it now has 295,000 developers signed up. AOL has been pushing their chat platform hard this year, last month giving out $100,000 for the best AIM-powered applications, and today sweeting the pot further by announcing the availability of AIM Money, a new revenue sharing program.
