My AOL Beta

I'd bet that most people who have been online for a number of years have their own personal AOL story; I myself subscribed to their service about 10 years ago and immediately cancelled, because I soon found out that the Internet is, well, it's free. As in, I figured out that I didn't have to pay for someone else to show me where I needed to go.

That being said, this week AOL has unveiled My AOL Beta, which is basically the same thing that Yahoo has been doing for several years (I've had my start page with Yahoo for a very long time), as well as Google just put together a personalized home page option as well (it's very streamlined, just like you would expect).

AOL Beta will deliver up to the minute updates from any website you choose that has an RSS feed; they've partnered up with Feedster to do this. Basically, they've given the benefits of RSS to AOL subscribers without all the technical mumbo-jumbo, and I would venture to say that this is similar to what Microsoft will do with Vista cum Longhorn and its planned RSS capability.

Related: Learn more about AOL's search capabilities from AOL Search 101.