America Online, Inc., has announced the initial beta release of My AOL, a new personalized home page on the AOL.com Web portal. The new AOL.com portal provides users with the flexibility to access and use the portal based on their specific needs and interests. In addition to a centralized page that provides a view of AOL.com's entire suite of features and its new Video Hub experience, the portal also provides a personal "My AOL" page for consumers who want fast access to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for updates of news and content they care about. AOL has teamed up with Feedster, a RSS search engine, to provide the capability for My AOL users to search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds that relate to their interests. Feedster's proprietary technology platform crawls the Web continuously fetching updated posts and RSS feeds. This is designed to enable delivery of a fresh index of information from millions of sources more frequently than traditional search engines.

With My AOL, each user decides what's important and can sign up for information feeds that relate to their personal interests. Features of the new My AOL personalized page include: a "My Feeds" section, which retrieves updated headlines from favorite Web sites. Users can select from a pre-set list of categories--from national news, business news, and politics to entertainment, sports news, technology, and humor--as well as add their own feed-based content to their personal My AOL page; the ability to add RSS feeds manually by entering RSS/XML addresses or URLs for favorite Web sites. My AOL will automatically scan these Web sites for all available feeds. The initial beta version of the new My AOL page is available from a "My AOL" Tab on the new AOL.com portal. Additional features will be incorporated over the coming weeks.

(www.aol.com; www.feedster.com)