AOL has started beta testing a new home page (the main AOL.com portal). AOL Senior Product Manager (and occasional TechCrunch contributor) Frank Gruber introduced it on his personal blog earlier today, although he is not the product manager for the product.
Nice portal…but it is nearly identical to Yahoo home page, which was redesigned last year. Click on the image above for a larger view. Internally, I’m hearing AOLers refer to the new portal as “the Yahoo Portal” although its official name is AOL 3.0.
Internet companies like to copy things from their competitors that work, but as we’ve seen even the largest companies sometimes get caught copying a little too much.
AOL says they are building best of breed products, not simply copying things from Google, Yahoo and others that are proven to work and porting them to its less cutting-edge audience. In the past year, though, we’ve seen them largely copy digg and then release a new mail product that would have been awesome two years ago but which stacks up poorly to the current versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
David Liu, Senior Vice President of Portals & Personal Media at AOL, has told me that a number of new products in development are going to be impressive. I’ve seen early demos and wireframes of some of them, and I think he’s right. The company needs a category killer to get some street cred.
AOL only looses with this copycat games. We should try to do something new, and better, in everyday that goes by. Do people really believe that others won’t notice no innovation is present?
Learn from the past, analyse the present, and project the future, that’s what big companies should do, that’s what I, as a student try to do!
Be authentic, or loose trying.
João Ribeiro, 23 years old, Computer Science Student
It´s really a print screen from yahoo…
At least they have change the logo…
Wow, this is terrible. They copied everything… even down to the tabs.
When I see things like this I just don’t get it… someone actually get paid to do this? What do the guys who ‘design’ this think?… that the world won’t notice… And what about the guy who is suppose to approve the ‘go live’ with this ‘new’ site… someone must get fired after this.
Check out my post (click my name) from the NY Video Meetup yesterday - AOL Video presented and I was completely underwhelmed. The man spoke for 3 minutes and I frankly had no idea what he said. And then the last 2 minutes was a demo of their killer AOL Uncut video which is basically an index of all of the other video sites.
Saw this earlier. This should be embarrassing for AOL. This is almost a complete copy.
I get the feeling that the new AOL main is not a copy of Yahoo main, but actually a re-brand of Yahoo main.
YAhOOL portal
Hey, if you can’t beat them, copy them.
ok, i love bashing aol and google when they rip off yahoo as much as anyone and this definitely displays a lack of ambition on aol’s part. but as the portals evolve a good touchstone might be to ask “how different are the MSOs’ EPGs?” having been a Comcast, TWC, and Cablevision digital subscriber over the last year i can tell you that the answer is “not very” (with Cablevision the most unique of the bunch)… yahoo is obviously building interfaces that work for this functionality; i would expect the rest of the portals to continue to follow their lead, not to mention that someone out there is most definitely comping up a knock-off Yahoo Go as we speak
There is a lot to be said here for visual vocabulary. From a marketing point it is a great thing to do. I cannot begin to tell you how many sites that I have been asked to work on where someone says…. “we are trying to be the next ORBITZ”, “can you make it look like Amazon”, “We are trying to be the next Priceline”….. THOSE are the ones with no creativity. But out of convenience they are counting on some things that the human eye does while on a site. They are counting on the human behavior element of the user adapting comfortably to the site based on familiarity.
C’mon guys, AOL has done WORSE THINGS…..
Wow as a web designer I would say that Homepage is a complete RIpoff.
Wow - zero effort whatsoever. No creativity, no passion. They are certainly working hard at making sure the AOL brand stays dead in the minds of influencers. Say what you will about Calacanis and the Digg clone, but at least it generated some press, lots of feedback and dialog, and interest in the Netscape brand. AOL seems unable internally to create the genesis for a similar effect.
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http://techfold.com
Wow, it says a lot about the creative abilities of the web developers AOL hires. They might as well get Yahoo! to provide the services. Even small web development firms can do a much better job than this.
Absolutely disgusting. What is this company doing. They are clearly delusional.
They also offered a full-fledged antivirus and AIM Pro - both which are pretty significant products.
WOW!!! Even the “Search” button is the same!
are they using the yahoo ui as well? that would would be vanilla cake.
Wow. Even the concept behind the tour was ripped off:
http://www.yahoo.com/newyahoo
and
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour/
Oops - This is disgusting. How could a leading company like AOL can do like this. Even small companies doesn’t do this, where no budget for good designers - lol. Its badly going to spoil AOL’s Brand and reputation.
http://www.suggestusability.com
They may have done a lot of research, exactly like Yahoo, and come up with the same design. Is that copying?
Yahoo actually ripped aol.com off 9 months ago when it relaunched its homepage. use archive.org to look at yahoo’s old homepage vs the new homepage aol.com launched 9 months ago. Pretty weird, right? I was just as surprised 9 months ago.
Everybody is overlooking the obvious - that the two companies are merging and this is step 1 in the corporate blending.
wow, there is no way to defend this.. pathetic
Mike, even more surprising is that they’ve launched this style across the board. Recently launched AOL India looks the same: http://www.aol.in/
When I worked at Yahoo (while they came up with the new home page) they did in fact do a lot of testing - and yes, there was public recognition of the fact. It was a very iterative process, bloggers would catch views of the new design, make comments, Yahoo would track all sorts of metrics, etc.
In the end, they came up with the current design. How did AOL do it? It’s so close to Yahoo’s, and I haven’t read ANYTHING about them testing a new page publicly, they must have copied.
End of story. Unless somebody can point out a blog post where somebody saw a preview of AOL’s “new design in progress” and a version or more of it in transition?
in2TV is the ONLY thing worthwhile at AOL. Watching all those classic TV shows free at AOL is great, but this portal is a lame ripoff of Yahoo! I am with those who wonder about the people who “design” this - and get paid for it!!
For those who have ’short term memory’ … the story began last year when Yahoo copied AOL portal …
Snapshot from a comment thread on Michael A’s blog post on Yahoo’s portal redesign last year ….
# Mahesh Babu
July 17th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Looks somewhat like http://www.aol.com portal page???.
# Michael
July 17th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Yeah once that somebody makes a change, everyone flocks afterwards. Why does all the new designs look very similar(at least to me)?
http://www.businessweek.com
aol - mentioned above by Mahesh
Is it not possible for Yahoo to sue them?
It HAS to be intentional and some sort of partnership. Even the little “ad feedback” link on the right side is identical.
Mmmm, it’s fun to watch companies you hate flail around.
Surely this doesn’t give a good impression of AOL.
Its a wonder all tech people hate AOL
they suck
and they suck
oh and they can’t even do anything original
Hi, it’s me again.
I’ll tell you why AOL need to copy Yahoo. Because they need to study genius user interface, increase revenue, ratings, and lower corporate taxes.
You see….
When stupid & idiot steve case brought AOL TIMEWARNER shares and enforcing to increase AOL price $14 to $21. The company crashed, stock crashed, and losing loyal and best customers super fast….
Timewarner executives & chairman got piss off at Steve case. They hated his guts. Real reason… Maybe he’s idiot business man after losing billion dollar revenues in three-four months. Forecast sales of AOL TIMEWARNER in 20-50… Timewarner can foresee future crash or bankruptcy. Now, Timewarner wanted to sell AOL unit to anyone. Google brought tiny AOL shares.
AOL only have little or no money left over. What to do without idiot steve case??
AOL have no leadership…
They need to copy Yahoo to bring back revenue!
I’ll tell you why AOL stock worthless.
1# There are less blacks, latinos got hired.
2# AOL trash talks on customers.
For example customer guy named Ferrari… He calmed
AOL can’t speak English. They all have college degree.
3# Stealing privacy & promote spam
putting massive telemarketing calls on Middle class
4# Where’s idiot steve case?
5# AOL could’ve brought youtube and brought lousy fish video company.
6# AOL only hire college degree.
7# AOL have 89% work place bullies.
8# AOL employees got nasy have sexual relations with kiddy rooms.
9# People see AOL as toliet paper company. You can google AOL. You will see tons of AOL & Steve case SUX website.
10# AOL cheat money too!!!
Finally, good news… AOL just dig an oil hole and steal Yahoo oil pipleline.
It took years and years to bring back AOL again.
I always thought AOL sucked, but this.. wow.. they really XXXX up big time.
That. Is. Awesome.
Actually Allen, you are wrong. AOL Uncut is not an index of all video sites. That is what Google Video is trying to do, as well as AOL Video. They are going towards the model of being a hub for all video across the web; whereas YouTube and UnCut Video are User Generated Content (UGC). It is true however UGC does filter amongst the user generated sites. Albeit they, unlike Google Video and AOL Video, are for the users to express themselves. If you ever looked at the content on AOL Video, not conducted a search, but navigated using the left rail links (i.e. “Music”>>”AOL Music”>>”AOL Music Sessions”>>”Akon”) you would notice that it is mostly licensed content.
If you guys worked Yahoo. Can you sue AOL for copyright infragement and own $1 billion rights to AOL?
What will happen if yahoo brought AOL?
I think AOL is prepping its users for the Yahoo/AOL buy-out coming up.
I do agree with some of the folks that 9 months back when I saw the new design of Y! it was very similar to the then newly done AOL. This rev of AOL is only slightly different than their last rev. Which tells me that they just had a natural evolution of their portal and it was not a copy. Have to give credit where its due.
Not a very smart move….
I’ts a copycat age …i’ts just ripoff of yahoo
Sometime I just wonder, who came first!
The internet or AOL?
Then again, I can always google it to find out
Sure you can say AOL ‘copied’ Yahoo’s homepage layout format…but to some extent, they are presenting the same and doing the same things, etc etc as Yahoo …so expect to see strikingly similarities
Is this a spoof story?
Its a marketing strategy.
As posted on Frank Gruber’s site:
Its a nice way to create a BUZZ..
I mean.. when people hear or reads that the new AOL portal is identical to yahoo’s hompage, it is likely possible that they will visit the new AOL portal.
And i guess the strategy is working.
=p
this is incredible, and sad.
agree w/ #4 Yakito — hard to believe a team of people actually got paid to design (read: “steal”), code, test, and launch this… and at no point did anyone say, “hey, this is exactly like the yahoo home page. should we do something else??”
re. #17 Anif — at least they have since changed the search buttons. a sign that perhaps they read TC?
When someone asked me to create a website that should look exactly like an example, he gave to me (another existing website), I told him, I wouldn’t do that, because it’s not the way I want to run my business (copying other’s work).
Shame on AOL!!
Where is the innovation???
On the other hand “small company” called Microsoft are doing a lot of money from copying other companies idies
They ought to get spanked, this is just too obvious…