aol

At the Mix '07 developers' conference tomorrow, AOL will show off its new Vista sidebar widget built with Silverlight technology. Called the "social e-mail gadget," this new tool will let you know when your personal A-list of contacts sends you an e-mail or IM, or posts a photo or video on an AOL service.

I kind of like the idea. E-mail is too cumbersome to monitor in a widget, unless you are rigorous about creating and maintaining filters, and even standard IM buddy lists have become visually overwhelming, due to the number of contacts most … Read more

AOL began beta testing a new look for its portal this week. It allows for more personalization and highlights relevant local information like traffic and gas prices, video content, e-mail and search. The redesigned site is randomly being exposed to about 5 percent of AOL's users during the test. The new version of the site should be widely available this summer. Meanwhile, AOL also launched an updated version of its portal in Canada and launched a new portal in India.

A 17-year-old New Yorker is getting a different kind of education. One of hard knocks.

The district attorney for the city of New York filed criminal charges this week against Mike Nieves, alleging he engaged in computer tampering and trepass, possession of illegally obtained computer-related material, and criminal mischief, according to a report in the New York Post.

The teen allegedly infected AOL's network with viruses, in a move to steal employee and customer information. Nieves allegedly scooped up sensitive personal information, including credit card data, from AOL's databases in Manhattan and India, resulting in an estimated $500,… Read more

So we've seen copycats and similarities floating around the internets before. Missing vowels in site names (understandable, domain names are getting pricey), reflections, gradient backgrounds, rounded corners. You name it we've seen it. What we haven't seen in a while is a copycat page design on this scale. AOL's new Beta page looks mighty familiar. So familiar, one of our readers sent us a tip, pointing out that it looks dangerously like Yahoo's home page. The real question here, is how does a company with so much money to throw around skimp on something as … Read more

Don't want to pay $10 to see the new John Travolta, Salma Hayek film Lonely Hearts? Just go to AOL's video portal beginning Friday and download a copy for free. The movie opened in theaters two weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles, and is distributed by Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films. A "limited supply" of downloads of the full-length feature will be available at AOL Video and a high-definition version will be for sale on ClickStar, a broadband entertainment venture founded by Revelations Entertainment, the production company co-headed by Morgan Freeman.

ClickStar and … Read more

Yesterday Yahoo announced they would begin offering Yahoo Mail users unlimited storage. The company will start with U.S. accounts and continue to roll out the upgrade to most of the world by the end of June. The only other major company to offer unlimited Web e-mail storage is AOL, starting in 2005 for paid members.

Despite the big upgrade, something that bugs me is that attachment sizes are still limited to 10MB for free accounts. Both MSN and Yahoo have premium e-mail services that double the mostly standard 10MB attachment size (at a price). This can be really handy … Read more

AOL released a new press release about its AIM instant messenger service this afternoon, and while there aren't any massive overhauls (unless you count Vista compatibility), you can expect a few new little perks. And maybe a few new little bugs. Yum.

The new release of AIM 6.1, which will be available later this week, is most notably the first version of AIM to be compatible with Windows Vista. Prior versions of the instant-messaging software had not been optimized for use with Microsoft's new operating system. (It wasn't the only popular download that needed to be … Read more

We knew it was going to happen one of these days; with all this talk about telling everyone where you are, from Twitter maps to Dodgeball, it was only a matter of time before a mainstream instant-messaging service decided to integrate location-based features. Well, now we have it. Sort of.

A company called Skyhook Wireless, which appears to specialize in location-based Wi-Fi data services, has built a plugin for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) that will allow you to share your location through Skyhook's Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) -- kind of an alternative to GPS. (Skyhook also created the Loki … Read more