• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 28, 2005

America Online today is expected to announce the beta release of "My AOL," an RSS-ready home page on AOL.com. With the help of RSS search engine Feedster, the site is what Kerry Parkins, AOL's director of audience products, called one of AOL.com's three front doors.

"Our strategy is to give users their choice between the ready-made AOL.com, the make-your-own-experience at My AOL, and the visually rich video page," Parkins explained.

With the new service, My AOL users can search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds that relate to their interests. "We see that RSS is a very powerful product," said Parkins. "And after evaluating a number of its competitors, we decided on Feedster to help us with the complex process of feed discovery."

Feedster's proprietary technology platform crawls the Web and fetches updated posts and RSS feeds. Its growing searchable index includes over 11 million RSS feeds and hundreds of millions of XML documents, according to Feedster's President and CEO Scott Rafer.

"AOL's embrace of RSS is going to really blow the lid off this industry that no one had heard of last year," Rafer said.

But, said Parkins, My AOL is not for the RSS pro. "This is not intended for news junkies who have 1,000 blog links to go through every day," she said. Rather, she said, it's "a product meant in every way to introduce RSS to the mass market."

Features of the new My AOL personalized page include a "My Feeds" section, which retrieves updated headlines from the desired Web sites, as well as the ability to add RSS feeds manually by entering RSS/XML addresses or URLs for selected sites.