Will Speaking

For those who remember Steve Mansour , you should check out his music site.   Steve worked at AOL many years (and I remember him having deep passion for Calendar).  He has been a musician for many years. Get this - he writes a lot of music,  plays many instruments and sings. It is really fun and cool stuff. I stumbled across this today, when I saw his profile on Facebook .

Junaid's team is working on "Chat 2.0", which is going to be a great project for the AIM and AOL Community. Chat hasn't been updated for years (it's still in FDO).  The plan is to use userplane technology as the basis.  Userplane Chat is very good.   I expect it needs careful roll out since users are not used to updates .  So steady as you go on this.  But a really improved experience. On the Userplane front, Techcrunch reports that Userplane announced the rev share platform today.  This is great news...  and hopefully we can use this model for other AOL projects.

I got myself a new "All in One" HP Printer on Saturday.   After the cat stood on top of it and knocked it flying off the shelf, I managed to install the software..  I am glad the printer still worked after it hit the ground.   It took 30 mins to install printer drivers for this thing and it was very complicated - I don't know how non- geeky folks would put up with just a long install process. Anyway, I scanned in some photos.. you remember photos, don't you?  Maybe in a shoebox somewhere or in a dusty album...   Yes, those.. the ones you flip through and you suddenly forget what you are doing and instead look at photos from sometime ago...   Well, here is one from my first software engineering job at a company named " Ashton -Tate".  This was 1991, just before Borland purchased the company. What you may notice is the state of the art computers in my cube.   That was when we had 5 1/4 inch floppy disks...

AIM 6.2 is in Beta, and it has some nice new features and updates. One is the "dark" theme (shown above) that lets you know move away from those light themes into the dark side.   Buddy Notes are also back (a popular feature in 5.x) AOL Pictures and AOL Radio got updates on the Mac this week. For more, see http://beta.aol.com/

The Magnet team is working hard on getting the beta build ready.   This week the team made amazing progress twiidling with the UI based on feedback from the users in Mountain View internal alpha.      More soon.  Stay tuned!

With a price of $666, this is an Apple you don't want to miss. (see more here)

Thanks for team members who volunteered to "Save The Bay".      It is very much appreciated!   Don't they look good in the AOL Community T-Shirts :-) Please vote too :-)

The myAOL Suite is under construction and coming soon.  The team is working very hard, burning the midnight oil.     Magnet, part of the suite offering, went into internal alpha testing this week, and we will roll that out further across AOL next week for more testing.     I now have QA builds of myAOL running every day, and am gradually adding more modules/widgets to it, as they arrive.       Great progress by the team!

AOL Labs Irvine team released " www.findmycelebritylookalike.com "  .  It is also available from the AOL Labs (labs.aol.com) external web site. Give it a try !

The Polls team (the team that generate's a ton of user input across the AOL network) continues to rock, with an alpha version of " PollIt".    The idea behind this is to allow you to create polls, comment on them, syndicate them across the web, share them -- and more.     You can embed on any page across the web. Polls also have categories.....  The team has built out the API's - the key part.  Now they have an alpha application that is built on the API's.   This is exactly the right way to go.       The PollIt site was created by the team and has some fancy AJAX UI.  And of course, the Polls team want your feedback. In a Poll and a comment. http://pollsdev-d01.polls.aol.com/_polls3/viewPoll.jsp?pollId=3_47   Enjoy. Great work team! Disclaimer:  this is the first alpha build. Be nice.  Expect it to have bugs. But most of all,  play with it and give feedback to the team. ...

We had a good time Saturday at the Human Race 2007.   Thanks to Ed, Namita , Prashanthi , Malika , TamiZ , TammyK and Edwin for volunteering.   It was a nice morning, a little chilly. T-shirts and AOL goodies went very fast.  We also had a few questions on troubleshooting AOL for the Mac, which Tommy tried to answer. Most important, The Volunteer Center raised more money this year, than last year too.    In addition,  our "AOL Running Man" was on center stage as the awards were being announced. I hope to see the official photos soon with the running man center stage.  ;-)       Kudo's to National Semiconductor who had nearly 300 people take place,  and raised over $40,000!  That is very good!

                                                      Stumbleupon has got to be one of my #1 used products in the last year. I am a big fan of it, and here's why: - It generates a ton of referral traffic to niche ( aka long tail) sites.    When someone recommends a web page, it gets entered into the stumble pages. It's collaborative filtering will recommend it to other people in the community.   The more you stumble, the more weight your recommendations take.   Here's an example:  on the aol pets blog , I did a couple of thumbs up.  Now stumbleupon is the #2 referring domain for the blog. - It has a deep and passionate community. I have connected with like minded people in the...

Congratulations to the Journals team, who this week launched a beta with some cool multi media features.  I'll let Junaid and Malika explain : Features include Integrated Userplane Web Recorder - to embed videos into your blog,  embedding of videos from other sites like YouTube and UnCutVideo,  and rich new integrations of photos - slideshows (woohoo), flickr photos and AOL Pictures.    Plus ONS Support.   Very cool. Congrats to the team! Try out the beta today! Go leave a comment for them here on the blog from the blogsteam!

We have positions open in Mail and soon to be positions open in myAOL (* pending deal with another company).   Please get the word out to your friends!  Positions include PDM ,  UI ,  Development and QA.

Get Smart, and Don't Miss This Advertising 101 month goes into full swing Wednesday with a session all about "How Advertising Sales Works," featuring Rob Deichert, VP, Ad Operations. Register to attend or catch the Webcast. The month is packed with activities to deepen our understanding of what we sell, how we sell and to whom we sell, so check the Get Smart site for other events.   _________________________________________________________________ William Morris My - AIMPage |  Blog | Gallery | Stumbles See what's free at AOL.com .

Here's a blast from the past. Looking at this I remember the charm of Jim Barksdale, plus the entire saying on Don't Play with Dead Snakes. Don't form a team, don't call a meeting.... if you don't know this old saying,  play the video. ;-)

Our Team:  My AOL The my AOL team is busy working towards a release of the myAOL Suite in June.   The first version has 3 key areas: myAOL offers a compelling, light weight personalization page,   Magnet - a great product to discover new content and give you recommendations,  and Favorites - our bookmarking and feed reading service  to get all your feeds in one place - and share them!     The suite is being designed such that the applications can run stand alone, or in the myAOL suite environment. View full size View full size The team has great people on it, working hard to get to the beta date. Across the board - UI/Visual,  Project Mgmt, Dev, QA , Product Management and Operations.    Most of the team is based in Mountain View,  close to the "fish tank" area.   Soon the team will announce an internal alpha of Magnet,  as well as an internal beta of myAOL .  Stay tuned!