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Source:TechCrunch
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.

Source:TechCrunch

Not all countries are created equal when it comes to social networking, at least in terms of how valuable each user is to advertisers. In an onstage interview with Michael Arrington at TC50, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe confirmed this:

Our international strategy is different than our competitors. We look at advertising dollars, and 95% of all advertising revenues come form 9 countries.

In those countries, we have 30% more unique users than our closest competitor in those 9 countries. So that is really our strategy.

He didn’t name all nine countries, but they probably include the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, France, and Canada

MySpace is also embracing Google Gears beyond just messaging. DeWolfe announced a new Google Gears project in the works that will let members take their profiles offline. Source:TechCrunch

TechCrunch50’s second session introduced four companies related to breaking news and online trends. The judges for this panel were: Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube; Marrissa Mayer, VP product and search; Google; Ron Conway, prolific Angel investor; Dan Farber, Cnet, Editor in chief. You can see our coverage of the first panel here.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles, DotSpots, angstro, livehit, stockmood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.