Gadgetopia

AOL Time Warner | Home: Buried deep within an AOL press release, is a half-dozen words announcing AOL's blogging plans: "For example, the same, easy approach used to share embedded pictures in AOL Mail today will also be used to create customized online albums, to send pictures through instant messages, ...

matt jones | work & thoughts: Screencaps of the new AOL blogging tool: AOL Journals.

Hearts and Minds: AOL's Agency Problem: Interesting look at how AOL irked ad agencies when they were at their height. Now they're scrambling to mend fences because the user base is shrinking along with their pull in the market. "For the most part, the deals were unsustainable. ...AOL was charging ...

Here's an interesting situation with a host I use. AOL is getting confused as to the actual source of email marked as spam, and mail forwarding servers are getting dinged as a result. [...] some customers have content filter rules to send all mail for their domain or for their ...

AOL says worker sold screen names: It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out. An America Online (TWX) software engineer was charged Wednesday with stealing 92 million AOL screen names and selling them to a spammer, federal prosecutors in New York said. [...] Both [the AOL worker and the ...

AOL unveils a $299 PC deal: Cheap, though you have to tack on the AOL premium. You can get decent dial-up for, say, $12 a month, or $10 less per month than AOL. So you're spending an extra $120 a year for AOL, which makes the computer actually cost $419. ...

Report says Time Warner held AOL sale talks with Microsoft: God help us. Time Warner Inc. may be looking into the possibility of selling its AOL unit to Microsoft, according to a published report Friday.

AOL to charge fee as way to cut spam: Marketers can now pay America Online to ensure their messages are delivered and not flagged as spam. How is this not bribery? The certified e-mail system would require advertisers to pay $2 to $3 per 1,000 messages. The plan is optional, ...

Why Time Warner Has Fallen in Love With AOL, Again: I can't believe Cory Doctorow hasn't jumped all over this yet. It's a case study for his point-of-view. [...] America Online is not merely alive but defiantly healthy -- especially when it needs to be, having recently taken a terrifying ...

Suspect in AOL theft makes conflicting impressions: An interesting look at the guy who got caught trying to buy AOL screen names from an employee. ...Dunaway was a "very nice gentleman. You'd never expect anything like that," said neighbor Christo Zaferatos. "That," of course, was the swarm of federal agents ...

Microsoft to pay AOL $750 million | CNET News.com: This is a bit of a downer because I thought AOL was edging closer to using Mozilla or another Gecko-based browser as their default. Seven more years on IE? That alone was probably worth the money to Microsoft. "As part of ...

AOL Tests TV Ads in AIM: The convergence of all things annoying. "In the latest instance of instant messaging meeting marketing, America Online plans to begin testing television-like streaming advertisements that will run within its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) IM client. The TV-length commercials, slated for launch next month, will ...

AOL to Sell Cheap PCs to Minorities and Seniors: Good strategy when your market stagnates, you take steps to make it bigger. America Online on Thursday said it plans to sell a low-priced PC targeting low-income and minority households who agree to sign up for a year of dialup ...

AOL's Garden Might Flourish Without Rainman: I did some searching for "Rainman" and didn't find much. The good news is they're bagging it for HTML. Over the past year, the Dulles new-media pioneer built a fancy new system to publish its fare not in the company's proprietary programming language called ...

AOL discontinuing newsgroup service: Obviously, you can still get them through Google Groups, but is it the same? America Online says it will no longer provide subscribers with access to Usenet newsgroups. When you visit keyword "newsgroups" while signed on to the service, a pop-up appears with the following message: ...

Report: Microsoft leading race to partner with AOL: If you listen closely, The Imperial March just start playing in the background. Microsoft has emerged as the front-runner in talks surrounding the potential sale of a stake in America Online, a report says.

AOL reveals top 10 spam subject lines of 2003: Here's a shocker. Viagra. Lowest mortgage rates. Hot XXX action. As seen on Oprah. [...] Those four phrases and six more topped the list of the most commonly-used subject lines for junk, or "spam" e-mail in 2003, Internet service provider AOL ...

For some reason today, I suddenly remembered an AOL commercial from about 10 years ago that was my "A Ha!" moment about the Net. In the commercial, a guy (a nerdy guy, actually) was talking to a woman at a party. They were dancing around the "asking me out on ...

OK, so I'm stretching for a clever title there. But the good news is that Microsoft has now joined AOL, Earthlink, and other large email providers by publishing Sender Policy Framework records for all their e-mail addresses, and are using SPF validation to scrutinize inbound mail. The company is strongly ...

AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers: And it's done. Should have seen it coming. "It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled ...

Accused AOL phisher spammed the FBI requires little comment... "An Ohio woman accused in federal court of using mass forged e-mails from "AOL security" to swindle America Online subscribers out of their credit card numbers was allegedly tracked down after spamming exactly the wrong person: an FBI agent specializing in ...

It is to laugh! A Register article reports that AOL is raffling off a $47,000 Porsche Boxster S that was seized last year as part of a settlement against a busted spammer. The company says the car's original owner made over $1m by unleashing a 1bn email spam tsunami on ...

Up2Speed: Verisign to Redirect 'Trash Traffic': I predict a war of some sort will break out over this. "Currently, when an incorrect address is entered into a browser, the user is directed either to a 404 page or to an MSN or AOL search page. This could soon change. These ...

When was your a-ha! moment about the Internet? Think back to the early days: can you remember a moment when you thought: Whoa, this thing may really take off? I was pondering this the other day, and I can remember three moments from the mid-nineties that made me sit up ...

ArsTechnica tells us that Microsoft and Yahoo will integrate their IM Networks. Sources tell me that Microsoft and Yahoo will announce a new partnership tomorrow that includes Instant Messaging network sharing that will effectively allow MSN Messenger users to talk to Yahoo's IM users, and vice versa. While details are ...

Feed Crier :: RSS and Atom Feeds by instant message: Adam Kalsey needs to sleep more. Feed Crier is your instant news reader. Subscribe to any RSS feed using your AOL Instant Messenger account. Waiting for an aggregator to update is so 2005.

Blog Change Bot: IM and RSS are starting to collide. "Blog Change Bot (blogchangebot on AIM) is a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messanger when a blog you are interested is updated. Subscribe via AIM or iChat to be automatically notified when the blog is updated."

AIM on your cellphone: Does someone want to try this and let us know how well it works? Today I stumbled across some very interesting documentation on how to use AOL Instant Messenger on your cellphone WITHOUT having to pay for web access and without buying an expensive 'AIM ready' ...

Live 8: If you want to see what all the fuss was about at Live 8, AOL has published the video. And, in a low-tech remix, this guy has listed them all in a nice table of contents, and deep-linked into them. No sign of the Bill Gates clip, sadly.

TrackMeNot: Would this really make a difference? Probably not, but it's an interesting idea. TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, ...

Interesting exchange between Paris Hilton and an Associated Press journalist: Q: Do you read blogs? HILTON: What's that? Q: Um, they're these things on the Internet where people write about news and stuff. HILTON: No, I don't really read anything on the Internet except my AOL mail. I don't like ...

Asterisk Voicemail that reacts to my AIM status: Interesting article on how to use your AIM status to control your voicemail. It occured to me that my computer already "knows" whether I'm in the office or not because my iChat status (aka my AOL Instant Messenger/AIM status, as they use ...

AOL instant-message service to expand: This article paints this as a shot across the Outlook bow, but I just don't see it. Email is one thing, chat is quite another. Starting Monday (at www.aimatwork.com), AIM customers can download a free plug-in that will let users of Microsoft Outlook see which ...

Back in 1968, Alan Poster bought a new 1968 Corvette Roadster, only to have it stolen three months later. He had just gone through a divorce and had stretched himself a bit buying said Vette, so didn't have the cash to buy theft insurance (his was one of 78,000 cars ...

Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins to save the planet: Al Gore is joining Kleiner-Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm that was an early investor Google, Amazon, AOL, Netscape, etc. Kleiner-Perkins practically created Sand Hill Road. The recovering politician, environmental activist, and Nobel laureate is adding another title to his ...

The Blog Herald: Yahoo! to buy Blog hosting company "....Yahoo! is set to launch into blogging based on the blog service it appears to be running in Korea (but no one is sure as its in Korean except the logo: Yahoo Korea Blog) ignores the recent history of Yahoo! and ...

I ve always wanted my site to get Slashdotted. That hasn t happened yet, but my company did just design and implement a site that got Slashdotted. Does that count? The GAIM IM client had to change its name AOL wasn t pleased. Somehow (to be honest, I don t remember how), we ...

Gates reveals his 'magic solution' to spam: Just imagine if he actually did it and become "The Man Who Solved the Spam Problem." The world would herald the savior. That's enough to give Apple die-hards a shiver. The battle to rid the world's in-boxes of spam has got itself a ...

Use Targeted Keywords in URL: A month ago, I questioned the use of keywords in URLs. These folks did a test. They put a garbage word in the URL of a page. They used the word nowhere else on the page or in the linktext to that page. Before we ...

20 Year Archive on Google Groups: Here's an oldie but a goodie that I stumbled on again today. Google mined its Usenet archive for the first mention of various events and pop culture icons. For instance, the first mention of Michael Jordan was dated to February 1993 by some guy ...

Exiled Spam King's Go-Go Life: Sanford Wallace was the king of spam. He built an empire called Cyber Promotions that was sued by about every company on Earth. I wanted to provide some links to demonstrate his notoriety, but I was overwhelmed Wired has had 34 stories about him ...

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time: I remember 90% of these. AOL is singled out as the worst, but there are some real trips down memory lane in here. The Cuecat: Readers were supposed to connect the device to a computer, install some software, scan the barcodes inside ...

Is Microsoft Still a Monopoly?: Here's a really interesting article postulating that Microsoft, well, sucks. Well, maybe not that harshly, but the article argues that Microsoft isn't a monopoly anymore, and goes on to point out many areas where Microsoft isn't even close to the top of the game. But ...

MSN Search MSNBOT: This is new. MSNBOT is a prototype Web crawler robot developed by MSN Search... More good information over at Scripting News: They [MSN] currently outsource all their searches to Inktomi and LookSmart, with ads embedded through a partnership with Overture. Now that Inktomi is owned by ...

Australia's Internet Industry Association is launching a new campaign to educate consumers on the best way to eliminate spam: "Don't try - Don't buy - Don't reply". "'Spam is the unwelcome by-product of a largely free and open email system', says IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos. 'Spammers are freeriding on ...