AOL Did Something Interesting...
First the photo. Another day, another dragonfly and the spiders are ok. There was sunshine too!
I just spent a couple hours playing with the the new myAOL-beta. Read the link for an overview and then check that beta thing out as it's pretty neat. Seriously cool photoblog following tools in many flavors. It's wild.
myPage - It's the usual custom start page that's been around forever but it lets you create more pages. I created a page that uses the "Add Any Feed" module to grab the RSS feed of ten photoblogs I follow. Made myself a very interesting visual RSS viewer. I could add more feeds to the page or expand to additional pages.
The Feeds module has a quirk though. You get a nice image thumbnail with summary as long as you enter the RSS feed. Atom does not work. I mention this because you have to copy and paste to get the RSS feed of an AOL Journal. The "add to AOL" link on Journals is set to the atom feed and uses the old version of AOL feed reader. If you add a AOL photo journal feed, make sure you add or change the feed URL to rss.xml
A whole page of photoblog feeds looks great.
Mgnet - Very similar to something Google trotted out a few weeks back except you select photos which, should, determine the news stories you see. I thought it was cool until I noticed that there was not a photo to represent baseball. No biggy, as you can delete the whole mgnet page from your myAOL!
Way cool the ability to delete mgnet as so often a custom start page always winds up sticking you with a mix of cool and lame options. If mgnet improves, I can add it back and remove it again so I'm not stuck with it alongside features I will use. Very nice that.
Favorites - Holy smoke, I probably should make an entire post about this tool. It's an RSS reader and bookmark tool. And it's on par with bloglines and better than google reader. Now Google reader choked on my bloglines OPML file (566 feeds) and the AOL feed reader took it. The AOL feed reader is not bloglines so I'm a little thumbs using it. It fetches feeds quickly and I'm impressed with it.
I've not gotten into the bookmarks option of Favorites yet. Interesting as I do sometimes store links in bloglines. What I have noticed is you can easily save items from the feed reader to the bookmarks. In that respect the Favorites blows bloglines outa the water, except you can't link blog saved items with Favorites as you can with Google reader.
Now there is something really strange in the Feed Reader and it's called Mix and Share. It's a way to combine one or more RSS feeds and then share them on a public URL. Here is my public share. It feels incomplete, I'm just not sure what to do with that page. Maybe I'm missing something with that.
I've got more to explore and that's really the impressive part. Been a while since AOL stole away an evening from me. I need to figure out if I can get an OPML file out of del.cio.us so I can really test out the bookmark option of Favorites. I'll have another entry once I get into the boomarks. I could go on and on though :-)
Go check the myAOL beta thing out. It's neat.
tags: photo dragonfly
8 comments:
Hi Steven :)
It's probably just my monitor, but I swear I see tiny white fangs on the dragonfly. Am I seeing tiny white fangs on the dragonfly? Because that would mean a whole other level of EWWWWW.LOL
Very, very beautiful photograph! I love the bright green and red, not to mention all the colors in the wings. Stunning.
Always, Me :)
My favorite of all the dragonfly photos so far. It's the light. Wonderful.
Great... there goes this evening! I think I will have to spend some time mucking around with this Beta. I looked at My Aol a long time ago and went ehhhh... I got better tools. This sounds like it might make me rethink that!
Thanks for the heads up re: MyAOL. I'm gonna give it a looksee. iGoogle lets you make pages or tabs, so I have 4 such pages on my iGoogle page and you can get widgets from anywhere, so I'm interested in seeing what AOL might be doing that's different.
Thanks for the review. Glad you found the new myAOL interesting.
I saw your questions on Mix & Share. It is one of my favorite features as it enables you to create a page with is also a feed. So you can pull it into a blog right rail, startpage, feed reader or send it out to your friends to check out. For example, if you were planning trip somewhere you could bookmark a bunch of places or travel feeds and send them out to your friends ... as you add items your friends will get the updates.
You provided some great feedback as well so please feel free to contact me directly with any other ideas or suggestions or to set-up a walk-thru of some of the features.
Best,
Frank Gruber
myAOL Product Manager
Also, the mix&share URL is really an atom feed URL, so you can subscribe to it as any regular feed, etc.
Cool and thanks. I put in some more time on the Mix and Share. Makes more sense with more feeds in the folder. Building out a simple lifestream with it.
Carly :-)
The whole dragonfly is backlit so portions of it look a little different, translucent. Of course it could be the elusive vampire dragonfly, a native to Texas ;-)
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