AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com – it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.
The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.
The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement.
Right now AOL isn’t saying much about Love.com, other than they plan to roll it out officially sometime later this year, and that the goal is “to create sites with content on any topic that people love.” Love.com is described on the MediaGlow site as “The Love.com Network covers all the topics you love, all under one big roof, with hundreds of thousands of topic blogs to suit fans of all things.” Eventually, we hear, users will be able to create a customizable home page which brings in content from specific topics they want to track.
Love.com originally launched in 2003 as a personals site. it was later changed to simply redirect to Match.com, which has a long term partnership with AOL.
More on AOL employee Frank Gruber’s blog.
AOL is usually good at building sites but this is terrible. Sorry.
It’s a great discovery channel. Good stuff.
Didn’t you leave this comment at 1:33PM?
“The quality of your publication is a joke. Goodbye.”
So what gives? Do you enjoy TechCrunch or hate it?
lol
LOL is right! I’m going to keep stopping by and continue replying to “anon”’s comments until he answers.
When you tell a blog “goodbye” and then continue using it, you’re a liar and you’re no worse than the publication you claim has “gone downhill”
yeah, but techcrunch really has gone downhill lately.
You’re a helpful, cheery, sort. How about something constructive?
It is good at building sites but this is terrible
They seem to have relevance issues
http://php.love.com/
Doesn’t seem very useful. I guess they are picking up the “.php” in random links as opposed to finding pages that are actually about php. So the contents is entirely random.
You should try searching for PHP on http://www.yauba.com to see consolidated search done right.
I just looked at yauba, nice looking but the results when filtered on mainstream news were a bit crappy.
What’s up with http://php.love.com/ ?
Seems on point to me?
What’s up with http://php.love.com/ ?
Seems on point to me?
Thanks for the feedback Rasmus. have another look, and feel free to ping me with other constructive feedback!
“No comment”
Wonder how much they paid for that domain. Probably made someone rich.
subdomain classification is gonna be a standard for all websites sooner or later.
SpamLocator.com – locate bullshite spammers from Ning.
Impressive. I just checked out about 10 topics which were really good and very timely (many times the latest news was within minutes). I like how they are using the search hat on the top as well once you click through to a 3rd party source. I also was surprised to see e-commerce offerings as well as twitter mentions. Also checked out a buzz topic like susan boyle and that was good too.
Love.com is a 1.0 era (remnant) AOL web property… just a PR attempt to create “news” – nothing new about it… nothing to see here people…..move along.
AOL = DOA
I think you are mistaken….I used to work at AOL…Love@ was a dating site….this new love.com obviously has nothing to do with that old site. rock and roll.love.com example above rocks, no pun intended
wonder if this is the influence of the new google leader over there…if so, by was that quick……this is very smart in my view (and expansive)
tim is a quick study and into technology so I would not be surprised if this love.com network has his fingerprints on it…..seems to coincide with the timing on press about him joining aol roughly a month ago. smart angle….any topic love.com…..clever. and great pay-offs..I just ckecked google.love.com and then jamie foxx given the movie opening and miley comments in the blogosphere. clever.
this is actually yet another example of a Cahall-Wilson partnership with each of their teams playing to their strengths. i saw the mention of gregory’s blog in the comments — he and Ian (he has blogged about it as well a few weeks back) are on cahall’s team and they have been given much discretion in combination with grant in mediaglow and others – kilpatrick, etc. — this is how the team’s work together on all projects. my colleague is in the small tight team and what they have planned for the summer is going to surprise a lot of people in my view. 2 in one week with dailyfinance app being talked about this past monday.
It’s a Relegence project that won adoption in AOL I am being informed from an AOL’er. The GUI’s slick, but the guts are 100% Relegence.
ex-googler: Think you are right — the timing on tim arriving at aol and love.com launching can’t be coincidence – aol is not this smart, we already know that. wonder how long he was working on it prior to joining aol
Maybe Tim came onboard because of Love.com
TurnITup: this is not 100% powered by relegence. We could not have done it without the help of various other groups inside of AOL. Blogsmith being the main one, as well as the open source lucen
o-town/ex-googler: the project was started before tim came onboard, and the inital concept was from a guy called edo. Tim has supplied some oil and gas to power it. and we plan on lighting the match.. stay tuned.
Thanks also go to Jon Miller and Jim Bankoff for pushing the AOL acquisitions of Relegence and Blogsmith in 2005, now clearly paying many dividends.
I’ve tried out a few topics and they work just great – check out ufos.love.com for example. It works like a search engine, if you compare php in google news and love.com it’s the same issue with PHP as an abbrev. AOL – do you plan to continue categorizing subject matter, as some results seem better than raw keyword searching, a la Wikipedia? It would make it infinitely more useful and avoid the obvious and (un)insightful comments.
I just did a google news search on love.com and found this post connected to a gregory who works at AOL and posted on april 2nd about the launch of love.com network of sites ….www.gregorytomlinson.com/encoded/ …. so does seem like this is brand new from AOL…..who would have thought it
I like the look and feel, it needs some tweaks but it’s def a good jump-off point for newsworthy topics. There’s stuff on the love.com page that’s ahead of Google News, and it gave me great news on the Cubs that I hadn’t seen elsewhere http://chicago-cubs.love.com
Michael….you outed me…I do love hamsters….best of all you turned me on to this new network of sites….can’t believe the hamster site has a link to buy habitats for hamsters…how cool! damn that is good. I just tried Bo Obama and that site rocked me. then i checked pfizer and other stocks I own and then drugs I take….they all were valuable to me…damn cool…but hamsters, you devil you.
hahahaha, he’s got a rodent fetish.
Hamsters page has the following recommendation:
“You may also like
Rabies”
“But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics”
Only because it generates pages for topics you search for. It’s just a search engine which searches a few data sources.
http://unrequited.love.com/
http://monkeys-...andas.love.com/
http://asdfg.love.com/
another frame bar…….
???
Check out the Twitter integration on http://oprah.love.com – looks like you can follow some of these – not many though
thanks for pointing that out…I did not notice ability to follow site updates via twitter on first view when I posted….Oprah just one example, i just now see it on the ufo example mentioned above…smart i just lost an hour surfing thru the network..it’s addictive and encourages discovery.
I don’t see an ability to follow hamster updates on twitter….what the f…discrimination against my fellow hamster lovers of the world. I bookmarked the site but AOL if you are listening, add a hamster twitter follow like you have on oprah (she does not do it for me the same way hamsters do).. you want more viral, i will give you hamster viral love
Your wish is our command, check back shortly.
michael – just checked out michael-arrington.love.com – all you, all the time…even videos of you! No mention of sex and hamsters there on the site though….you crack me up that you used those two examples in your post, together!
http://hamster-sex.love.com — you asked for it.
clowns
Its really an awesome site includes almost everything and its a cool effort by AOL Team.
I keep clicking around and trying to put in random stuff, some not great, but mostly good returns http://tramp-stamp.love.com
this is the best thing AOL has done in a decade, as soon as sites try to become “portals” for everything you do online they start to falter and die. (i.e. myspace) “The site… is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself.” Means these site will actually have a chance to survive because it separating itself from an old tired brand that gets a lot of backlash. not to mention this sounds like a web spiders wet dream..
@taufer and @AOLer here is the post I wrote announcing the love network days before Tim started with AOL
http://gregoryt...e-love-network/
@o-town & @ex-googler, ian is correct this project has been in the works for months if not a year. and cranked into high gear at the beginning of 2009. I am extremely excited about the product! hope everyone can approach it with the same open mind that mike has because this product does deserve a look
What’s there on Love.com today is a mix of Relegence, Blogsmith, and a lot of smart development attributing mostly to @IanHolsman and @Gregory80. Kudos also to @TwitterMarvin who kicked it off on the front end.
We haven’t really launched yet. There is a lot more to come. Feedback is of course welcomed, encouraged!
How much did they spend on the domain?
No idea – already owned by AOL for many years.
This idea is not worth-spending the domain, love.com(period)
I like it. It is a little weird to assume that people love the thing they’re searching for. When I typed “swine flu” I expected it to come back and say, “You love swine flu?! WTF?”
Amusing that it then suggested that I might also like, “Cold and Flu, Flu, General Motors Corp.”
Needs a bit more work. A search on “fashion” brought up a lot of unrelated Bollywood articles that briefly mentioned the word. They need to apply more context or at least pay attention to repetition.
Also not crazy about the toolbar framing, but it looks like that’s the way of the future.
try the fashion one again. but remember there is a *LOT* of fashion news out there.
Well, all we have here is a nicely designed scraper that simply pulls in content from various places…
It may well be useful, but nothing radically new… I wonder if Google will penalize them at some point for scraping / duplicate content issues…
Then again, I guess Google will give them a ‘pass’ because it is an AOL property.
There are many, many, many sites that do this sort of topic hub-cum-search thing…
AOL has owned the domain going back to 1995..used it..then leased it to match..then used it…then leased it to match again…and now this. Seems that their can get more out of the domain via SEO than with match which has been sideways for years….
Site doesn’t work past the front page. Dead end for me. I block javascript from third party domains and I’m not going to turn it off for AOL.
DOA
Then most of the modern sites on the internet aren’t going to work for you. Sorry buddy.
I really like it. I just checked out the hub which I liked as it showed the heat of the top stories overall (don’t miss the “see all” ) and then by category. Then I just put in all my favorite musicians, actors, cars, etc and the site I got back was each time of the moment with not only news but videos, twitter, etc. I wanted to leave a comment on a message board but no opportunity for that….otherwise loved it..go love, all love from me.
Love.com is just an AOL version of alltop. Pulling in feeds and generating “content” pages based on the RSS feeds.
Yet another great use of the technology set out by the Relegece Tel-Aviv team. Their real time engine is the heart of the topics seen here.
Way to go!
Mike,
You got your internet history wrong. Love.com was launched by AOL in April 1999 as the open web version of the very successful personals site, Love@AOL. It was perhaps the first attempt by some of there at the time to to open the walled garden. Senior executives at the time didn’t get it, and it was mothballed for the TW merger. The launch in 2003 was the second instance of Love.com
I dont like the page design.
in Addition to that… The Domain fits more to a Dating Site or s.th. else.
It is very Impressive. I just checked out about 10 topics which were really good and very timely . I like how they are using the search hat on the top as well once you click through to a 3rd party source. I also was surprised to see e-commerce offerings as well as twitter mentions.