AOL To Add Third Party Services To AOL.COM – Leaked Screenshots

The big portals redesign their home pages every year or so, and AOL is no exception – a little over a year ago they were roundly criticized for copying much of the look and feel of Yahoo.com .

But the new trend is to retain user loyalty by adding third party content to these sites, which previously only linked off network for advertisements. Yahoo did this with the launch of Buzz earlier this year.

If these screen shots are real and AOL intends to push them live, this is an even more radical departure from the home-grown-content-only days. The top image clearly shows user-created bookmark links on the top left, links to third party email services Yahoo Mail, GMail and Hotmail, and links to outside social networks Facebook and MySpace.

And the bottom image looks to have a RSS reader, allowing users to pull in content from virtually and third party news site.