AOL tried jumping into the social news network scene a while back with a site cloned like Digg.com. They even went so far as to hire some of Diggs top posting users to help boost up their sites content. That didn't really work out so well.
Well AOL is at it again. Their new beta design for AOL.com is almost a complete rip-off of Yahoo's homepage design. Is AOL trying to speed up their own death? Why can't they come up with something that works for them but also works for their users?
More info from TechCrunch including screenshots:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/26/aol-one-step-behind-again-new-home-page-identical-to-yahoo/
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http://www.aol.com/?optin=beta3 doesn't load for me (it redirects to Aol.de and then stalls on some mediaplex.com ad), but judging from the screenshot this is indeed a total rip-off. But why would someone do this, as people will find out anyway? Is this maybe a very unlike coincidence, or perhaps they're both using the same basic template (or basic approach, based on some proven design grids), ... or maybe they're just trolling for attention, hoping someone finds out, figuring any news is good news? |
AOL has its share of problems all over,.. in yesterday chatter I picked this up – "17-year old Mike Nieves broke into AOL's networks and databases containing customer information and infected AOL's servers"
The details are still gray, but from what I understand he manged to insert code and funnel back critical data to his PC. He has been doing this for about 18 months.
so from a technology standpoint, it appears that they are not very bright and surely the easiest thing to do is rip other templates /design..!
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total ripoff. an exact copy. apparantely inside AOL, they refer to it as 'the Yahoo portal.'
a nice side by side look:
http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/aolyahoob.png
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I used this proxy: http://proxify.com/ and it worked! you can take a tour or just use it! |
<< total ripoff. an exact copy. apparantely inside AOL, they refer to it as 'the Yahoo portal.' >>
That's shocking! Are AOL and Yahoo about to merge or something? |
That would be weird if they merged. Google would then own a certain percentage of Yahoo if it did happen. Since they bought a 5% stake in Yahoo. |
Sometimes, we need the same UI for these big websites. So save the time to find some words on the page....
The content is the king, UI should use simple and standard.
Yahoo seams have some standard and encourage other website use its standard.
Aol did it well. Maybe somedays later, browse soft can filter the UI and use my like UI as default function. Not only a plugin for FF. |
<<Google would then own a certain percentage of Yahoo if it did happen. Since they bought a 5% stake in Yahoo.>>
Did you mean: Since they bought a 5% stake in AOL. |
