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Welcome to the new Yahoo AOL
This is either what happens when you spend too much time analyzing the competition, or if your April Fool’s prank is a few weeks behind schedule.
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| Yahoo’s original | AOL’s clone |
Digg could take what Calacanis did with Netscape as a compliment, but this is just asking for a lawsuit.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
This is exactly why AOL continues to fail. They don’t have an original idea in their head. Time Warner has not been able to turn them around and needs to cut them loose.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
that is the most flagrant rip i have ever seen. AOL should be embarrassed.
April 27th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
It’s almost absurd how similar some of the elements are. Vertical gradients in the left navigation, and so on.
I’d really love to hear what was going through everyone’s heads when this was being produced…
April 27th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I don’t know about flagrant rip off but yeah it’s really similar. They just didn’t attempt to come up with something they could call original. It is different but I would definitely have to say it was heavily inspired by Yahoo.
But I guess they say imitation is the biggest form of flattery and AOL is trying to become and Portal and Yahoo does it best.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Why am I not surprised?
What good stuff has come from AOL? (serious question)
April 29th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
AOL sucks big time!!
April 30th, 2007 at 10:28 am
I saw this the other day on techcrunch or somewhere, I was absolutely shocked that they would let this even get as far as public beta. It basically just shouts “Hey AOL is just a bunch of un-original asses and we really think Yahoo is better than us!”
I mean please, this is so ridiculous. If I was the lead designer at Yahoo! I would be pissed.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Ha ha thats great. The worst part of it is how they almost exactly copied the menus colour shading! I would be surprised if you looked through the code and found a “coppyright yahoo” in there somewhere!
April 30th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
To add to this, AOL isn’t just testing a beta for the US. The AOL Canada page is now the Yahoo clone:
http://www.AOL.ca
What a shame.
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:47 am
Hey, they’re just paying Yahoo! back for copying Google’s search results. It’s a vicious cycle ;)
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:02 am
If I was the lead designer at Yahoo! I would be on the floor laughing my ass off. It’s really amusing when people try to “flatter” you this way.