Will Speaking

Congrats to the teams that worked on the re-launch of a very important Community hub - People Connection .    The launch happened today. As you can see, it's got a new UI, and light AOL branding.   I like the facewall, and direct links to profile. Thanks to the BDC Dev and QA teams, PjM in Dulles, Ops  and the Community editorial teams !   It's looking good! Check it out. http://peopleconnection.aol.com/

Kerry came into the office today, with her baby Katie!   How cute Katie is... as you can see from this photo,  she is interested in music.         What a great surprise to see Kerry today!  Very cool.   Ally came by as I was walking to the kitchen area, and I said "hi" not even noticing Kerry and Katie at first :-)   Wonderful! View full size Photo 1 : Kerry, Ally and Katie... View full size Photo 2 : Kerry and Katie View full size Photo 3 : Ally, Montse, Brock, Kerry and Katie...

Thanks to the great feature of the new Webmail -- in beta now -- I can "one click" to add an email to the Will Speaking blog (or any blog!).  Hope this doesn't cause too much excitement on my part to blog.     Prashanti already told me I spam too much ;-)  Anyhow, here is a message provided by Ed Maier on behalf of the AOL Pictures team.   Please try out the new AOL Pictures Print Store. Kudo's to the team on GM, and to Ed, who [once again] played a great role in this. From: Ed Maier <edmaiernscp@AOL.COM> Subject: Launch of the New AOL Pictures Print Store Congratulations to the AOL Pictures and EZP teams for the successful launch of our new print store!  This launch would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the team listed below. Several people put in long hours for the past few months to make this a reality. Please make their efforts worth it by placing your orders today. ;) Check out the print s...

Two new "Community" Blogs launched..... The Community Editorial team, lead by Suzie Austin, has launched two new communities (using blogs). Notice that both have light AOL branding, with more emphasis on community branding. " The Comics Alliance " is live. If you are into Comics (and many are!), this is the community for you. Personally, I used to love getting "The Beano" many years ago. The second is " Queer Sighted" , part of the AOL Gay and Lesbian Community.    The blog looks good, some very interesting articles, plus good links back to the editors profiles on AIMPages.  More is in the works, but these are now live.

In the past few weeks, we've had some organization updates that I know alot of people have discussed in the hallway, but I wanted to address in this blog . The AOL Pictures team and XDrive team (based in LA) have come together as one team, lead by Robert Blatt .  The teams had similar roadmaps (both moving towards "sharing"), and after much discussion the decision was made to combine the teams.    Right now, the team is working to understand each others technology,  plus working on a combined plan. Lots more to come here.  Organizationally, the product, dev and qa teams will work under Roberts leadership.  AOL UnCut Video is under going some updates and transition.  The QA work will be centralized in Tucson, under Nancy Earnhearts leadership. Our Irvine team, lead by Keren Perlmutter and Sharon Perlmutter ,   has officially joined the AOL Labs team.  Keren and Sharon did great work last year, and will continue to lead th...

The Webmail team have been working hard on the new "Cayman" beta.   First off, this is a sneak peak of the beta  - essentially they want your feedback.   It's for internal users only, so please do not share with people outside AOL. You'll see the new Webmail has a new and slick user interface.  Replying to a message is inline now. When your mailbox loads - no more paging to see the next set of messages.     It really looks like a winner.   By the way, behind the scenes this is using DOJO, as well as TurboAjax/TurboWidgets for some of the page controls. Give it a try.  Get your bugs written up.  Use it daily.    http://beta.webmail.aol.com . View full size      View full size Here's the official message from the Webmail team. Be sure to read the known issue section. Greetings MV Campus!  Many of you have seen prototypes, demos and mock-ups over the past few months but I'm...

From: junaid <junaidnscp@aol.com> Subject: found on the staircase .. (if you want to blog about it). A late friday afternoon session in works ... "hotel California" .... the effects were way cool -- echo that is ! :) Junaid

Aol Pictures is testing a new print store, plus some additional feature updates with public galleries and uploading. The team needs your help to get the bugs out. Give it a try. http://pictures-beta.aol.com

Today is the start of the "Year of the pig". Happy New Year!!!

   Balan Nair, David Cole  and Barry Appelman were pleased with the visit today.  The architecture overviews of the products went well, so thankyou to all the teams that put time into those.     Additionally, it was good to see the brown bag so well attended.   

Our plane to take us was on the run way for 1.5 hours with people on it. so that is at the gate now... we will get on soon.

Our Blog product has a great mobile update gateway...   Essentially an email address.. So I can update the blog via email,  IM,  Phone or the Web.  Pure and Simple.         Check it out!   _________________________________________________________________ William Morris My - AIMPage |  Blog | Gallery | Stumbles

AlanK introduced me to twitter.   Yes I know, many people have discovered this before me... I am late to this party.   It's an interesting product, with some very heavy usage for people who use it. Essentially it lets you send messages/blast outs to your friends.. via phone, IM or web.      You also get your friends comments to the web, IM or via SMS to your phone. Sounds silly, right?     Well, maybe not.  Very social, quite addictive... and a good way to express yourself..      Seems aimed at the demographics who are hooked on the SMSing.   I wonder if they make money from this?   If you twitter alot, that's a lot of messages to people's cell phones.  Check it out.    I am williammorris on twitter.     

First the snow,  then the ice.. I only had to drive across the street from AOL HQ to the hotel next to "Wegmans" but it was a little slippy....       Flight was cancelled tonight, so will head back Wednesday.

It's snowing on and off here in Dulles, and more expected tonight.   Luckily I am right across from the campus in the hotel, and don't have to skid "too far"  

According to ValleyWag ... I wonder if this is true...

Junaid was talking with me on Friday about how much traffic the Anna Nicole comments on "The Cooler" blog were getting.. Within in minutes of the news breaking,  we had 1000 comments to the blog entry.... it has climbed alot since that day. We then talked about what happens next.... where does this community go to talk about this event?    So I checked out the pages and noticed: 1) Yahoo has no way to interact on the news pages they have.  They published lots of articles on Anna Nicole, but you could not add a comment to the page. Users "fell off"... they could not react to the news article.   Yahoo has a nice widget that shows you related links - but nothing points to a message board or blog or 360. 2) AOL News had some interaction - mainly polls.. It then directed you off to the TMZ or Cooler blog, but after that no place to go. 3) Youtube has thousands of videos in a matter of days on Anna Nicole. 4) Myspace and Friendster had communities and p...

This AOL Blog is really, really good.... From AOL Photographers, it has some really great photos,  and articles.  Check it out if you get a chance.  

  Get Smart

What does the DL stand for any way?  It means "The Down Low" I think - I don't think it means "Dynamic Lead".  Who cares?  Well, if you go to AOL's hip/happening site " dl.aol.com", you'll see content targeted towards the MTV/Myspace demographic.  It even has a segment on " At the YouTube", which is hosted by two guys sitting in the AOL telesuites chatting about crazy videos they have spotted on You Tube.  It all feels like a mix of Myspace+E! channel+MTV.       Right now, it has an interview with a person who goes by the name of Mr Pregnant. This guy I think was on a Jerry Springer show,  and has videos on YouTube, Uncut and other places.  Pretty crude comedy essentially.     Infact, very crude. I am purposely not linking to it, since it will probably offend you.   This video has caused such a debate internally on the WEB-DEV alias,  that I'd imagine ...

The AIM 6.0 team got a stellar review in the Wall Street Journal today, from Walt Mossberg.    This is just excellent -- a lot of hard work went into taking AIM from Triton to a new 6.0 client.   Great work! (esp since Walt didn't have good things to write about the Triton client - AIM has come along way). Read the review here. Side Note: Even though my role is in this area now, I had nothing to do with this. I am pointing this out since the team really did a great job. "I n the end, AOL came out on top. It offers tabbed messaging, a neat way to organize numerous conversations into one window; and "notifications" or brief summaries of messages that appear on-screen when the chat window isn't opened. Neither AOL nor Microsoft restricts the size of photos or files that you can share; Yahoo does. And I had a hard time getting video chatting to work with Yahoo Messenger"

According to Jason's blog , Randy Falco spoke at iMedia yesterday.   Read about it here and here .  The 1 on 1 interview has some good q&a with randy.    

             Here are some upcoming events in the next 2 weeks at AOL Silicon Valley. Thursday Feb 8th Brown Bag - 2007 Social Media and AIM Plans , hosted by Kerry Parkins.  Starts at 12PM. Saturday Feb 10th, Community Next , Stanford. AOL Silicon Valley is sponsoring this event, focusing on online communities. Thursday Feb 15th, 12PM .  Join Balan Nair, the AOL CTO, for a brown bag covering technology and his organization.   Thursday Feb 15th, SVASE event hosted at AOL Silicon Valley - Digital Media - The Coming explosion in Internet Advertising.  Hosted at AOL Silicon Valley campus, join Tami Zhu and others on this very important subject. 

Have you "woohoo'd" yet?   If not, give it a go, and get a woohoo widget on your myspace page, blog, homepage or a link in your email footer.   This is a cool widget, that can syndicate photos very easily, all over the place.   Place your links to your woohoo's in the comments below.   Lets get this widget well known across the net/ woohoo.aim.com . 

An online/realtime poll is taking place to vote for the new 7 wonders of the world.  The winners will be announced in July.     Check it out... I voted, but I won't tell you who for. The New 7 Wonders of the World will be announced during the Official Declaration ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal on Saturday, July 7, 2007 - 07.07.07.

This site came up when I was using stumbleupon.    The "only in america" one is funny. The World in only 7 pictures Stumbleupon Reviews of the site

This is a catchy video made for comic relief in the UK.   You won't get this tune out your head !       Bonus points if you can name any of the people in the video.  

Some photos from Bangalore - first album is the party the team did for Maneesh, to celebrate his promotion.   The second album is the SocNet team in Bangalore.

AIMPages Search launched Profile Browsing today. You can go through profiles in alphabetical order - I think this will get a lot of page views.    It would be good if other products like UnCut, Pictures and Journals had similar "discovery" features - think it may help generate traffic, since it is rather addictive.