Cue released data this week that shows that the average number of email messages received by users of its service in 2012 was 5,579. While that figure is not representative of the market at large, it does show how much traffic many email inboxes handle year in, year out.

And how are we coping with that onslaught? Not very well. Cue reports that average email response time lengthened from 2.2 days to 2.5 days. That’s not surprising given that Cue users wrote a staggering 41,368 email words on average in 2012, the equivalent of the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

Our Email Tools Are Prehistoric

The email tools many use to manage this tsunami were created in pre-historic times. Microsoft Outlook dates back to 1992 with the release of Outlook for MS-DOS. Its Outlook Express 1.0 stable mate was released in 1996.

Based on my analysis of data compiled by Campaign Monitor, these Microsoft desktop clients continue to rule the roost, with about 30% of desktop usage. Web-based email is the overall leader at 48% but that includes mobile as well. Note that these figures are not mutually exclusive since many people now use several ways to access email.

The multi-client trend is quite evident when you consider mobile use. According to Campaign Monitor, mobile clients overtook desktop-based email in February 2012, with iOS devices leading the way capturing 87% of email use.

The unfortunate reality over the past few years is that desktop software innovation has almost ground to a halt due to a major shift in focus to mobile apps.

But while it’s nice to occasionally tap an email response on your mobile device, fact is hard-core productivity still largely takes place on the desktop. And with desktop I also, of course, refer to notebook computers, since notebook sales surpassed that of desktops in either 2008 or 2009, depending on whether you believe iSupply or Reuters.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, a scant two years from now, the installed base of PCs will top 2.3 billion. By comparison, as of 2012, the installed base of smartphones was 1 billion worldwide.

So while I hate to be a bubble-bursting buzz kill, take your mind off of mobile for an instance, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and focus on where the real productivity action remains. It’s a topic I have covered twice in ReadWrite: 'Screensucking’ Is Sapping American Productivity And Innovation and Why Aren’t Entrepreneurs Developing Innovative Solutions For Renters?

Great Minds Think Alike

Luckily, there are a few brave souls who are fighting the mobile tide. Since email is a disaster and not looking to get any better soon, progressive designers at AOL, yes you read that right: AOL, have come up with an innovative email client, called Alto.

What I like about Alto is how it graphically manages your email, making the process quasi-enjoyable. You can quickly create “stacks” for certain emails, click on “snooze” for others and connect your social media. Alto is currently available for AOL, Gmail, iCloud and Yahoo! webmail.

AOL has cooked up an innovative new way to manage your webmail. Alto is a free service that can quickly help you create topic-based e-mail “stacks” and leverage your social networks to help bring your e-mail to life.

While Alto is a commendable idea, let me help you architect the next big thing in email. The worst aspect of email is prioritizing. While a few startups are trying to solve this problem, namely Tray.io plus the aforementioned Cue, most require that you create cumbersome rules for each contact. That’s too much to ask of anyone in business.

Programmers - Not Users - Should Do The Sorting

Inboxes need intelligence and should learn from watching users interact. It’s far easier for a programmer to write a few rules that help auto-sort email. Cue notes that 56% of e-mails are answered in one hour. So the first if-then rule should be: “If an email reply is sent in less than 60 minutes, then add recipient to key contacts list.”

Other semantic or image parsing techniques could be used to alleviate mailbox logjams. For example, many users are inundated with “Bacn” - self-requested spam sent by merchants, social networks and businesses. Some users like to scan and delete these messages, others like to file Bacn in special folders.

An intelligent email program could manage the process for you. All emails from Macy’s go into a Stores folder or stack. All emails from Victoria’s Secret go in an Eye Candy folder (joking), etc. Here’s wishing that cutting-edge email innovation can help prevent people like Michael Arrington from having 7,000 unread emails in his inbox.

Please do not reply, this is an automated e-mail story. But feel free to use the comments!

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

As attention fades for Yahoo's latest CEO switch, we turn to another Internet pioneer -- AOL. That company has a new version of its Web-based email software, is basking in good quarterly earnings and this week saw its stock price briefly hit a yearly high. Talk about mixed emotions, the rally followed one of its lowest rates of decline in revenue in a while.

Recent good financials were aided by the sale of more than $1 billion worth of patents to Microsoft. Had it not made that deal, AOL would have lost more than $30 million last quarter. Like Yahoo, it's a big company that has lost its way. And no better example of that strategy is the update of their webmail (below) that is being brought online in the next week. 

The update is the first major overhaul of AOL mail in nearly five years. In that time, AOL has bled email customers to Gmail and others. comScore says the free AOLmail service has 24 million users, which contrasts with the numbers of paid AOL subscribers at fewer than 5 million. At AOL's peak, it had about 27 million paid subscribers.

(Whether you believe these numbers or not, there still are lots of folks with inactive AOL.com accounts. I probably have four or five AOLmail accounts, none of which I have checked in probably 10 years.)

 The company said that its new email interface is cleaner, but it's still pretty cluttered compared to Gmail and even Hotmail. AOL execs also claim the backend infrastructure is faster and more stable. That's nice, but it's something that they should be working on continuously.

Probably the most noticeable new email feature is Facebook messaging that is integrated with AOL's Instant Messenger and SMS texts. And the messaging center is right on the email screen, in the same position as Google's integrated chat window. Did it really take them five years to figure this out?

AOL had been an email leader in the early days. Back in 1992, it had one of the earliest and most connected email gateways to CompuServe, MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, AppleLink, Sprint Mail and other Internet-connected systems. A year later, it was the only online provider with a palm-top software client. This was back when we all used dial-up.

AOL was also the go-to IM network when IM was the defacto teen communications tool. Too bad this generation has since moved on to texting and sexting.

AOL sowed the seeds of its decline with the buyout of Compuserve, Netscape and, eventually, Time Warner. It couldn't decide whether it was a media or a technology company. In the past several years it has bought numerous content properties, such as HuffingtonPost, Engadget, TechCrunch, Patch and my favorite video-streaming site, 5min.com.

It has more than a billion dollars in cash still on hand, so expect it to buy more content providers. And their ad sales are improving, basically replacing the revenue from all those dial-up customers and people who have turned off their $20 monthly Internet service.

All of this may be too late to save AOL email. Regardless of what the Web interface looks like, having an email address at aol.com is akin to broadcasting that you live in a shabby neighborhood where few people tend their lawns. And while it is great that AOL has a renewed webmailer, it isn't going to bring people back.

Let's face facts: If you've got mail, you are reading it somewhere else.

According to an initial survey of 2.8 million U.S. households conducted by energy monitoring and management firm Opower, which looked at power consumption in homes of Yahoo Mail and Gmail users, the average Yahoo Mail household used 11% more electricity than a Gmail-using household in 2011.

The difference of 939 kilowatt-hours per household is stark: That’s enough juice to accommodate 150 cycles of clothes drying, five hours of television watching every day of the year, and 200 dishwasher loads combined.

Big Houses, Not Big Data

Berry Fischer, Opower’s head writer and author of the study, said that while he and his colleagues expected to find some difference between the homes using various domains, they were surprised the difference was so large.

“We were excited to explore the reasons why there was such a gap,” Fischer said in an interview this week.

And what might some of those reasons be?

In the report on its Outlier blog, Opower ruled out climate as a differentiator, but did notice that Yahoo Mail users appeared to live in larger homes. But Yahoo homes also consumed more energy per square foot, which added to the energy gap.

Data from other surveys conducted by Hunch.com and Experian offered more clues to what might be happening here. Those surveys found that Gmail users tend to be younger and single.

“Being young and single means going out more; less time at home - and fewer occupants - means less electricity usage,” Fischer wrote. “By contrast, Yahoo users are more likely to be in relationships and have children. Additionally, Hunch found that Gmail users are more likely to be active travelers (having journeyed to 5 or more countries), and so might be away from home more often.”

Gmail users also appear to be more attuned to their energy use overall, which helps reduce their overall footprint, the report concluded.

What About AOL and Hotmail?

The report generated so much interest that Opower posted a follow-up analysis Wednesday that included data results for AOL and Hotmail users.

The second report revealed that AOL users used the most energy of any domain tested: 18.5% more energy annually than a Gmail home. Reasons why appear to be location (AOL users tend to live in the suburbs), size of home (they have even bigger houses than Yahoo Mail users) and - curiously - a greater likelihood of owning multiple DVR devices, which are very energy-intensive.

Opower, which focuses on providing customized energy advice to residential customers, gleaned these results from a subset of the 40 million U.S. households from which it has collected extensive data. The goal was to highlight how many factors can influence home energy consumption.

Of course, there are simple ways to save power no matter what email service you use.

“Whether you’re on a laptop or desktop, the next time you’re going to step away from your computer for more than 15 minutes or so, think about putting it in sleep mode… You’ll use a lot less electricity (>70% less) and save up to $75 a year,” Fischer suggested.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

ReadWriteWeb: I think a lot of people don't realize how big Huffington Post is and what a technical challenge that can be. What's a current snapshot?

Paul Berry: We're 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We're at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.

The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.

Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.

And these 220 people are...

That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post... we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.

The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful - we had no money. I couldn't just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that's not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can't have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.

What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?

Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you're spending a lot of time talking about security, it's because you've gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it's terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you're talking about security or scalability, you're generally suffering. It's a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape - how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.

So what are these new projects?

There's two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I've actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I'm really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.

Rebel Mouse is the startup company that's well defined - it has its name and its logo and it's a really well-defined concept that we're deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It's not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there's a ton of companies. It's going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we'll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.

My definition of viral is: We don't spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.

Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?

When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack - whichever you end up using - you have tremendous potential. It's crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.

One of the surprises has been that MySQL - when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die - and it's actually very much alive. We use Redis ("sort of a database alternative") a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we'll definitely be using at the incubator.

Our intrepid gumshoe at Fusible.com has poked around some more, and now we have specifics about the kinds of features we can expect to see on mqVibe. It will sport tight Facebook integration, and it will combine reviews and popularity votes on neighborhoods and businesses into a "vibe score." AOL really is going to take a shot at Google Places and Yelp.

No, we didn't get an invitation. I guess we've been working too hard to blow mqVibe's cover. But denverpost.com did, and the embargo goes up early tomorrow morning.

JB at Fusible.com took some good guesses for other URLs around mqVibe and then viewed the source. By looking at the elements visible in the code, he uncovered tons of specifics about mqVibe's features. Here are the highlights he found:

• The subtitle for MQVibe is "Neighborhood Hotspots, Rankings & Reviews".
• The site will be integrated with Facebook. The Facebook page for Neighborhoodvibe will be located at: http://www.facebook.com/NeighborhoodVIBE
• You will be able to invite your Facebook friends to vote on hot neighborhoods and local hotspots and post items to your Facebook wall.
• Neighborhoods and hotspots will receive a vibe rank that you'll be able to vote up or down.
• Each place in MQVibe will be described by its vibe score and its underlying factors. These factors are based on crowd-sourced user behavior and physical characteristics of the place, such as the category and location of local businesses, density, features of the urban geography, and demographics.
• You will be able to quickly search by neighborhood or city according to a search form on the home page.
• MQVibe appears to be or is in alpha testing, according to a "Send Alpha feedback" link that appears at the top of several internal pages http://about.nvibe.com/help/report-issue/
• The Report Issue page offers some of the most telling information about the site's features (shown in the picture above). Using the Report Issue page, users can: suggest a hotspot, or correct a hotspot name or boundary; suggest adding a business that is missing; suggest a correction to the details of an existing business; report an issue with the ranking of a local business; report a business that is closed is still in the rankings; and report an issue with the neighborhood scores (Vibe Score, Walkability, Popularity, Edginess, etc.).
• Neighborhoodvibe will be the website's blog and will use WordPress as its publishing platform. The blog will be located at http://nvibe.mapquest.com/.
• The placeholder page for MQVibe online help can found at http://mqhelp.mapquest.com/mqvibe/.
A link in the footer refers to MQVibe as "Business Center".

Something Cool is Coming...

"Something cool is coming to your neighborhood," the mqVibe splash page reads. Really? Are any of the above features going to stand out? As we wrote when we confirmed mqVibe's existence, Google has a lot of these features, and they're already live and in use.

The Facebook integration could be interesting, since so many local businesses use their Facebook pages to interact with their customers, but that just makes AOL dependent on Facebook. Google is offering businesses something more tangible, though: a point of sale. Both Google Offers and AOL's Patch Deals can compete to give local customers the best deal, but AOL's hurdles to get users to adopt this service are so much higher.

What do you think? Does mqVibe have a chance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Earlier this month, we reported on a slew of domain name purchases and trademark applications that indicated some kind of AOL social network was in the works. At the time, we figured it could have just been speculative. But no, it looks like AOL is serious. MapQuest will be the hub of AOL's effort to get on the social networking map.

The original Internet behemoth purchased NVIBE.com, NeighborhoodVibe.com and mqVibe.com this year. All of those domains point to the new "coming soon" page. AOL also registered a big portfolio of trademarks for each of these domains that indicate a location-based social networking service. Here's a selection:

Serial Number: 85419192
Online social networking services; online local and community social networking services

Serial Number: 85419185
Providing a website that enables users to connect with people in a particular neighborhood or city; Providing user-defined content and content of others selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of users

Serial Number: 85419176
Providing neighborhood and community information in the fields of education, entertainment, local events and activities, current events, shopping, arts, culture, and sports; Providing information about community and neighborhood livability

Serial Number: 85419162
Providing geographic information, destination information, interactive maps, and driving directions via computer and communications networks; Providing information, news, and commentary in the field of travel via computer and communications networks

Serial Number: 85419151
Providing information and news in the field of local business

Now that we have a hint on the MapQuest website, it looks like we can expect a map-powered social network that combines location-based services for individuals, local news, information, entertainment and shopping, and travel directions like those MapQuest already offers. This is a space Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and others are all vying to control. AOL has been silent about this, but it's strongly positioned to make this play.

Google Maps may rule the roost, but MapQuest is good technology. Moreover, Patch, AOL's network of local news sites, is dying for a sustainable business model. AOL launched a daily deals platform tied to Patch in June, and a map-powered social news network would be an ideal place to market it. AOL has all the pieces it needs to build this thing. It just needs to put them together.

Can AOL Outdo Google?

It will need to do it well, though. Google is going wild in all of these areas. It bought The Dealmap to integrate its own daily deals into its Maps product, and it keeps expanding Google Offers to more markets. It bought Zagat to provide content for local business guides, a shot across the bow at Yelp. And Google's even going where AOL can't by pushing NFC payments for smartphones with Google Wallet, which would close the payments loop on all of these local business plays. If AOL is going to win this game, it has to swing for the fences.

Thanks very much to Fusible for three excellent scoops on the domain purchases and trademark applications.

Do you think AOL has a shot with its mqVibe neighborhood social network? Sound off in the comments.

AOL acquired Bebo, another social networking site, for $850 million in 2008 but sold it for around $10 million two years later. Ouch. AOL has not announced any news related to NVIBE, nor has the domain been linked to the trademark applications in any way other than the date of origin, but these trademarks clearly describe the features of a full-fledged social network.

Fusible was first to report these trademark applications by AOL Inc.:

Serial Number: 85419192
Online social networking services; online local and community social networking services

Serial Number: 85419185
Providing a website that enables users to connect with people in a particular neighborhood or city; Providing user-defined content and content of others selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of users

Serial Number: 85419176
Providing neighborhood and community information in the fields of education, entertainment, local events and activities, current events, shopping, arts, culture, and sports; Providing information about community and neighborhood livability

Serial Number: 85419162
Providing geographic information, destination information, interactive maps, and driving directions via computer and communications networks; Providing information, news, and commentary in the field of travel via computer and communications networks

Serial Number: 85419151
Providing information and news in the field of local business

When more information about NVIBE comes to light, we'll be sure to report it.

Update 9/15 8:00 a.m.: Fusible has also discovered that AOL registered five similar trademarks for "Neighborhood Vibe" in August 2011; serial numbers 85391630, 85391628, 85391626, 85391625, 85391623. They also registered neighborhoodvibe.com on January 11 of this year.

(hat tip: Fusible)

AOL's secret internal plan to ramp up its online content business was leaked today to New York business blog Business Insider and people are saying it's got "content farm" written all over it. In-house writers are expected to write 5 to 10 blog posts per day and those stories are expected to go from an average of 1500 pageviews per post today to an amazing 7000 views per post in the future. How will stories be selected? The only thing that will matter, apparently, is search engine friendliness and monetization potential. That might sound terrible to outsiders, but having been there I want to say: Good luck AOL, I hope that strategy works wonderfully for you. I genuinely do.

The 58 page document titled The AOL Way: Content, Product, Media Engineering, and Revenue Management is worth a read to anyone in the media business, but the hardest pill to swallow is the relationship between quantity, quality and money.

David Carr at the New York Times tweets: "Must Read, Must Not Emulate: Fascinating Look Inside the Word Gulag at AOL." Tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says, "AOL expects its staff writers to write 5 to 10 stories per day! Yeah. Right. That's going to happen." Social media analyst Jessica Well says, "Yeah... quantity over quality... that's the spirit, AOL! :/"

I'm sure the writers filling those quotas are paid more than the $5 per post that I got paid 5 years ago. When I took the position the pay had just gone up from $4 per post!

At that time I was also writing 6 posts per day about international currency speculation, as a subcontractor for a CMS company. And doing 3 to 5 interviews per week with a nonprofit technology organization. I was producing roughly 10 to 12 posts per day. Having landed those three gigs, I quit my minimum wage job at a convenience store in my home town. (Thanks, AOL content farm!)

Were those posts any good? They were good enough that when tech blog top story aggregator Techmeme launched, I had 8 headlines there in 8 weeks. Then one day Michael Arrington called and hired me at TechCrunch. "You keep beating us to stories," he told me. I was able to do that because I was getting RSS feeds from key vendors in our market delivered by IM and SMS. That's standard practice among tech bloggers now, but at the time no one else was doing it, so I was able to cover lots of news first. The fact that I was able to do it under the AOL banner, for any pay at all, was a great platform for me.

Right: Barb Dybwad, then at AOL, took this picture of me showing her a blog I was working on for a local natural foods store when we met at the first tech industry event I attended, an unconference called Tag Camp. A few months later, Barb hired me to write for AOL. Today she's at a site called Tecca. Thanks, Barb!

Now I'm the co-editor of ReadWriteWeb and I'm happy to report that things are very different for me.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we pay our writers far better, but we do ask full timers to write 5 posts each day. We ask them to write smart, informed, quality posts. Preferably before anyone else does. It's very hard, but very enjoyable work.

You know what, though? We've got a full time news spot open right now and I'm having a hard time filling it. I think of AOL, big as it is, as a farm team in the minor leagues. I made a splash in the minors and then got called up to the major leagues. Where are the minor leagues now, though? Where are the tech bloggers who have toiled for too little pay, pumped out large quantities of content and proven themselves to have potential to work on a different level?

I don't know where those sites are anymore. If they appear again, though, I'm guessing they'll look like content farms.

The executives behind such outfits, publishing on mass scale, are inevitably going to treat writers and readers like worthless pawns in a chess game worth billions of dollars. It would be a mistake to expect them to do anything else.

But some of those people will demonstrate that they aren't just pawns, that they are writers, journalists and power-bloggers.

Big league bloggers and writers these days need to be able to write well, in large quantity and quickly. It's not easy, but who said writing for a living, in an era when anyone can publish with ease, was going to be easy?

So AOL, go build a giant content farm for mainstream readers. I'm sure some of the content will be worth reading, and though management's priorities are SEO and monetization, I'm sure many of the writers will sneak in some gems. While you've got them, give them a trial by fire, too. Then send them our way. Or don't - if they are capable of stepping up to the plate and hitting homeruns - hopefully we'll find them before our competitors do.

In his statement about today's announcement, Google's CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt notes that "It's particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users' online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses." As AOL is currently renewing its focus on mobile apps, it only makes sense for this renewed search agreement to specifically cover this area, too. While the two companies did not disclose any financial details of the new deal, AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong told Bloomberg earlier today that "this deal is a lot of revenue and a lot of potential profits for AOL."

The new agreement between AOL and Google comes shortly after Microsoft and Yahoo finalized the transition from Yahoo's search engine to Microsoft's Bing. Based on comScore's data, Google and AOL currently command about 68.1% of the search market in the U.S. and the combined market share of Microsoft and Yahoo is about 28.1%.

Along with the launch of "MapQuest Open," as the project is called, AOL also announced a $1 million OpenStreetMap investment fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the U.S. "MapQuest is the first large-scale mapping site to embrace the open-source community," said Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local and Mapping.

$1 Million for OpenStreetMap

The fund is specifically targeted toward filling in gaps and adding data to the specific U.S. communities covered by AOL's hyperlocal news, business and event listing resource, Patch. At present, Patch supports select communities in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. Localized editions of Patch include embedded maps across the site's many pages, displaying relevant news and events. The data on these maps already comes from OpenStreetMap, as opposed to MapQuest's own service.

AOL's head of engineering, Local and Mapping, Randy Meech, made the announcement of the company's new initiatives at the fourth annual international OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map 2010, in Girona, Spain. One of the slides from Meech's presentation addresses the question many may have regarding this new project: "Why is it starting in the U.K., not the U.S.?" According to Meech, the U.K. and Germany are ahead in quality right now, and the "navigability needs improvement" in the U.S. The fund, obviously, should help with some of these issues.

Fighting Google and Bing with Open Source?

Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, praised AOL for its efforts, calling its move to join up with the open-source movement one that "represents rare foresight in recognizing that the future of map data will be a commons."

But for AOL, the move is likely less about the feel-good aspect of supporting open source and more of a calculated business decision. Using open data will allow the company to quickly ramp up its maps with more information and details, including things like bike paths, hiking trails, parks and neighborhood streets, without having to invest significant funds in order to do so. While the end result may not have the whizz-bang of competitors like Google Maps or Bing Maps with their Street Views, map applications, Bird's Eye views, 3D features and other advancements, the open maps may, in some cases, end up being more accurate thanks to the crowd-sourced data coming from local residents.

It's a smart strategy for a brand whose name was once so aligned with mapping it actually became a verb: "Just MapQuest it." Oddly enough, people often still say that today, but then head over to Google Maps instead. MapQuest hopes it's not too late to change that.

Yahoo, the second largest search engine after Google, said it will complete this acquisition in the third quarter of 2010. Although financial terms were not released by either company, the deal is thought to be worth in the area of $90-100 million.

"Together, we'll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network," Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in the official news release.

"Having insight into user intent through its leading search products enables Yahoo! to identify topics important to advertisers and users. Yahoo! plans to use Associated Content to create content around those topics and leverage Associated Content to contribute content to existing media properties."

Business Insider pointed out that Associated Content, backed in part by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, had considered AOL to be the most likely buyer, but they decided to launch the SEED "open content submission platform" instead.

Competitors include AOL and Demand Media. Demand has been criticized for producing a large amount of arguably low-quality content and is thought to be preparing for an IPO.

Associated Content also brings along the deals it has with publishers like Reuters, Turner, Scripps and Fox.

DST's Investment: Facebook, Zynga, Groupon

DST, of course, is also famous for making a major investment in Facebook last year and earlier this month, the Russian telecom giant also invested in Internet coupon site Groupon. DST also holds a stake in Zynga.

According to DST's CEO Yuri Millner, "the acquisition of ICQ is a strategic enhancement of our business in Russia and Eastern Europe. ICQ's long-standing brand name and its sizeable loyal customer base together represent a very attractive opportunity to further strengthen our position in the region."

Given ICQ's popularity in Russia, DST was probably the best buyer for the instant messaging service. It's unlikely, however, that DST will try to make ICQ a worldwide player in the instant messaging market again.

AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year's South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed.

The article quotes an internal communication, saying that AOL is looking "to be leaders in one of the most promising 'white spaces' on the Internet" as well as "in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content".

Patch is a "hyperlocal" website that offers news, photos and videos, discussions and information about local businesses. It is run by "professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities [they] serve". As such, Patch seems like a perfect candidate for the type of service offered by another arm of AOL, crowdsourced content provider Seed.

While the article declares the intention to go from 30 sites to hundreds "quite the ambitious goal," we wonder if having a system like Seed already in place wouldn't make an otherwise potentially daunting task a bit easier. Actually, the SXSW coverage seems like a good testing ground for doing the same sort of coverage in hundreds of locations throughout the country.

As Paid Content wrote last month, Saul Hansell left the New York Times' Bits Blog in December to join Seed, with the purpose of "leveraging Seed across all of AOL's platforms".

Looking at the site, it would seem that the only issue in growing from 30 to hundreds would be general scalability, as each location is identical, but with different content. With an army of content providers at your fingertips, it would seem that the expansion is the obvious next step more than anything else.

The partnership will use Facebook Connect to import a user's Facebook friends into their AIM contacts, enabling chat directly between the two services. This will allow AIM's 17 million users to continue using AIM while being able to keep in touch with their existing friends on AIM.

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The Great Migrations

Let's face it - if we can avoid it, we'd rather not do this again and that's precisely what Facebook wants. Facebook has already become the dominant platform for social networking, but as it expands its business in other directions, we will begin to see it pull users away from other businesses too. This partnership is not only about preventing that, but further solidifying Facebook's place as our one, true login.

The more integrated Facebook becomes, the less willing we'll be to recreate that same web of social connections we've reinvented time and again.

While many of us may complain about Facebook's on-site chat breaking down, being slow or crashing our browsers, the fact remains that Facebook is where we've based our online social life and chat is a basic extension of this. AIM used to be one of the industry standards in this realm, but now it looks more like the company is hedging its bets and trying not to fall prey to the same circumstances that caused us to abandon other platforms.

Your One True Login

In this case, however, it isn't the connections that are being imported - real-time interaction with an external user base is being imported. Whether or not a particular friend has an account with AOL is irrelevant. The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

While other integrations attempt to replicate our social connections, to port them over to the site we're on, this one makes no such demands. We can continue using AIM while taking advantage of the particular friend set we've likely spent the most time cultivating and grooming - our Facebook friends.

In order for AOL to survive, they've had to focus on becoming a content business instead of an internet provider and that's exactly what the new branding is designed to reflect. Gone are the all-capital letters ("AOL") which remind people of what they stand for ("American Online"). Now, there's an uppercase "A" followed by lowercase letters and a period. This is meant to remind people that "there's always something behind AOL," says CEO Tim Armstrong in an interview with PaidContent. "The AOL brand is composed of many different things. The nomenclature of the dot is what comes after the dot." In other words, AOL no longer stands alone. It's Aol.music, Aol.Mapquest, Aol.Shopping, etc.

The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age and gender after having collected the data from social media profiles where people have publicly disclosed this information. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their blog post. Users of social media sites already tend to be younger, so it's not surprising that they found that the majority of the webmail users studied were young with 75% under the age of 35.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

The Hotmail Attack

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

While this may appear to be a basic life streaming client for Twitter and Facebook, one of the great features of this service is the fact that it allows users to drag and drop images, URLs and text directly from the browser. While the company will be hard pressed to get users to switch from their loyal desktop lifestreaming clients, this drag and drop functionality may be the best case to switch. The service is available by downloading AIM 7. As announced at today's TechCrunch 50 Conference, the Lifestream iPhone app is currently in the App Store approval process and will be available shortly.

Socialthing, once considered a competitor to fellow lifestreaming service FriendFeed, still exists as a social media aggregation portal (in private beta) at socialthing.com where users can stream their activities from across the social web. After AOL purchased Socialthing last year, they soon integrated the technology into their social networking site, Bebo, where it served as a tool to import social web activity into Bebo's version of the News Feed.

Now, with the introduction of Socialthing for Websites, a service that made a quiet debut last week on AOL's country music destination "The Boot," AOL is transforming all their media properties into social media properties.

How it Works

With Socialthing, web site visitors can sign in to the various web sites using their AOL screenname and password, and soon their Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, or OpenID, instead of having to create a new account on the site. This ability puts it up against other single sign-in heavyweights like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. The authentication is made possible by the AOL Open Authentication (OpenAuth) Platform which allows sites to authenticate users using AOL and AIM usernames and passwords and is now being expanded to support the other services as well.

In addition, visitors can also chat with each other over AIM and ICQ while on the site itself, a feature that allows for real-time interactions between those who share common interests.

And then there is, of course, the social syndication aspect. Site visitors will be able to share messages and experiences across the social web including sites like Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Socialthing Differentiates Itself from FriendFeed & Competes with Facebook Connect

The authentication aspect, the active social sharing, and the online chat now set the new Socialthing for Websites apart from its one-time competitor FriendFeed. Today's Socialthing service is much more than a simple lifestream aggregator - it's a tool that can transform closed sites into social web portals. But will Socialthing pick up any traction outside of AOL's own properties? It could since the platform is open for developers to build services on top of it or integrate it into their own sites. That may actually have some appeal over, say, Facebook Connect for example, since it won't limit you to sharing your content with just one social networking site.

However, now that Facebook has opened up their data streams to developers, it's clear that the battle for conversation control is just getting started. Despite Socialthing's open nature, it's possible they'll still have a tough time competing considering the Facebook revolution that's currently underway.

AOL says Socialthing will launch on their blog for movie enthusiasts, Cinematical, in the "coming weeks" before rolling out the technology to the rest of their sites.

We first reported about rumors of this update in early September and today's update confirms our earlier reports.

Customization and Widgets for Social Networks

AOL users can now see updates from AIM, Facebook, and MySpace right on the homepage. Support for Bebo and Twitter is coming soon. This move comes just a few weeks after AOL also allowed its users to check mail from third-party email services right from the homepage.

The most interesting update is probably the inclusion of a prominent RSS reader widget at the bottom of the homepage.

The new AOL homepage also allows users to customize the main navigation bar with bookmarks, local news, and RSS feeds. AOL Mail has also been updated to match the look and feel of the new homepage.

AOL also announced that it will now give advertisers the option to offer customized wallpapers for the homepage and more rich media content through AOL's Platform A.

Is Traffic to AOL.com Growing?

According to AOL, year-over-years visits to AOL.com grew 15%, while total minutes were up 40%. It should be noted, however, that both Compete and Google Trends show a downwards trend over the last year.

While it might be hard to get excited about new features on AOL, it is good to see that the company is bringing more social networking and customization features to its user base.