Many bloggers have reportedly left. The group behind TVSquad is doing something a little different, though. They haven’t left, but much of the team has launched a directly competing blog called CliqueClack. The writers continue to punch the time clock at AOL, but my guess is their heart and soul is going into the new blog. The topical overlap is 100%.

Editor Joel Keller wrote a post on TVSquad today talking about the “evolution” of the blog, including coverage of less shows. He didn’t mention the new CliquClack site (where he also now works), but some readers noticed a press release on CliqueClack in their email, and the comments are full of thoughts on the dual blogs.

There’s nothing AOL can do to stop their bloggers from competing, but what will be interesting is if they keep the team on as well.

Earlier this month both AOL and Yahoo redesigned their home pages to include more links to outside services. The new AOL homepage features prominent links to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to bookmarks leading elsewhere, and integration with Facebook and MySpace. Yahoo’s new home page, which it is still bucket testing selectively, also includes more directlinkstoother e-mail providers, social networks, and a new left-hand channel strip that can be modeified by suers to include links to their favorite Web services. For YAhoo, it is part of its strategy to become the preimier starting point on the Web, no matter where people wan to go. But in an era when the destination site is quickly dying, if not already dead (with information pushed and personalized to you via services like Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter), will these redesigns be enough?

In a note today, Wall Street analyst Douglas Anmuth (formerly of Lehman Brothers, now of Barclays Capital) is not so sure.

Ooyala, a video platform founded by two seasoned Google veterans, has launched a powerful new analytics backend for its service that it calls Backlot Analytics. The new analytics software allows content providers to get an extremely detailed data on their users’ viewing behaviors, helping them tweak their ad placement and future content selection. Backlot Analytics will be available as a native application in Adobe AIR, and will also work in the browser.Source:TechCrunch

On Monday we posted a leaked screenshot showing a redesigned AOL homepage that included integration with third party email services (Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail), personalized bookmarks linking anywhere, integration with third party social networks (Facebook and MySpace) and a RSS reader.

AOL is now rolling out some of these features. The major email competitors are all now included on the top right of the AOL.com home page, which reaches 105 million people worldwide each month (Comscore July 2008). The changes are described here in detail.

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.

MapQuest today launched its new homepage design that aims at reducing the amount of time you spend surfing through the site’s pages and keeps you doing more of what you want.

According to the company’s Vice President of product development, Mark Law, MapQuest has received countless messages from users asking execs to revamp the site and make it a more useful tool for getting work done quickly and efficiently.  And in order to do so, MapQuest’s latest design (which, right now, mostly impacts the homepage) tries to take the site from a “directions and map service” to a “location-centric” service that provides mapping and directions.

The improved MapQuest homepage now features a map that displays the location you input into the box above it.  MapQuest said that most of its users — about 48 million unique — simply didn’t want to move from page to page when searching on a map and it decided to make the front page the place to get practically everything.

Included in that map, the new MapQuest homepage will allow you to get gas prices and see where construction is going on in a cleaner interface than before.  On top of that, it will feature a Weather section and available live cams (in certain cities) to show you what’s happening on the ground.

MapQuest is also using its AOL ownership and will now display different AOL properties at the bottom of the page, like City Guide, which lets you search for point of interest and practically anything else in the city you’re viewing.

More importantly, MapQuest is using the bottom of the page to see if users want the information to be included in the maps.  Want to find the best burger in New York with City Guide on MapQuest maps?  If so, tell the company that you want to do it and if enough people agree, it’ll integrate that into the maps.

MapQuest claims getting directions will be easier too.  Instead of offering two search boxes like it does now, the new MapQuest homepage will leave the directions box “greyed out” until you decide to search for directions.  Once you do, it’ll work just as it does now.

I had the opportunity to see the new MapQuest homepage in action and it does look much cleaner and generally more useful than its predecessor.  That said, I don’t know if it’s really enough to make Google Maps users switch and MapQuest was quick to note that this is just the beginning of much more to come.

The company wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but as more of its pages are revamped and it improves its offerings, it’ll be interesting to see what will come of it.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:MapQuest Maps Get GreenMapQuest’s Latest API Utilizes Actionscript 3MapQuest Debuts Traffic Data FeaturesAOL’s New Mobile Services to take Geo-Presence MainstreamGarmin Teams Up with Google and MapQuest for Simple Data TransfersYahoo Maps Major Upgrades – Whose Maps Do You Like Best?MapQuest Releases Open APIs With New Free Dev Platform

AOL has announced the launch of a new flash-based instant messaging application today. AIM Express allows you to do everything you can in the normal AIM client inside of a Web browser. In my testing this morning, I found it to work very well. As you chat with more people, tabs show up on the top of the application so you can jump back and forth. Everything is contained inside of the one Flash application.

I wonder if they could port this to a desktop app using Adobe AIR as it would allow everything to be contained inside the app instead of opening windows for each current chat. The new AIM Express also allows for text messaging using SMS for friends that are offline.

AOL also announced the launch of an updated Windows Mobile client. The new client includes ads from AOL’s Platform-A division.

Other companies in the Web IM and chat space include current CN sponsor eBuddy and Meebo.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

AOL has announced this morning that through their Platform-A online advertising brand, they will bring together buy.at and Goowy Media. buy.at is an affiliate network with partners including Blockbuster and Ticketmaster. Goowy Media provides a widget platform and also powers the yourminis Webtop. This new offering will take the buy.at network and Goowy’s technology to create a new set of monetizable widgets that publishers can place on their Web sites and blogs.

The first company to use the new affiliate widget setup is Ticketmaster. The widget is named "EventEngine" and will allow for customization of specific events.

AOL acquired Goowy in February of 2008 and buy.at also in early 2008. I still believes that widgets will change the advertising landscape this year.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter