the daily grind

That's right, today is my last day at AOL. The grind is coming to a halt.

 I'll make this brief.

Thank you J-land for reading and listening. It's been an amazing experience. I am not sure I will ever be able to be a product "owner" that blogs with such a captive and engaging audience. I will still be lurking around J-land "halls" and reading your wonderful journals.

Thank you all at AOL for giving me the opportunities.

This journal was always intended to be AOL and AOL Journals focused so this will be my last posting here.




yoelcrane at 11:25:13 AM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 7 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Taken with my phone (sorry about the quality)


yoelcrane at 4:13:36 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 5 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Journals development team (old & new). UI & Project Management. Some of the folks in this picture were on the original team!! The QA team was in another meeting. I'll try to get them in a photo as well.

*******UPDATE**************
Left to Right (standing): Joseph, Holly, Vish, Malika, Bruce, Eric, Carles, John
Kneeling: Kai, Yoel


Tags: AOL Journals, AOL Journals Anniversary

yoelcrane at 4:12:10 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 5 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Happy Birthday AOL Journals and the J-Land Community

Here are few links to entries and a journal dedicated to this day.
Celebrate the AOL Journals Three Year Anniversary With a Tasty Snack
Three Years!
3rd Anniversary AOL Journals


Tags: AOL Journals, AOL Journals Anniversary

yoelcrane at 3:34:08 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Our friends at AOL Pictures just launched, to beta, a public picture gallery. I don't see this as us taking on Flickr or the next Flickr killer. There can be a coexistence of like products. AOL has millions (if not more, I don't know the exact number) of photos on AOL Pictures, opening the doors for the public to view (the ones we choose to make public) them is in line with our strategy.

Check out my public picutres: http://pictures-beta.aol.com/galleries/yoelcrane

Leave comments for the pictures team on their journal: http://journals.aol.com/aolpictures/AOLPictures/entries/2006/08/10/try-it-out/1319

yoelcrane at 4:48:24 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Mountain view fish tank


yoelcrane at 7:25:04 AM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 2 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

yoelcrane at 2:11:45 AM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 2 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

We're getting ready to wrap up release 6. It's a little later than expected and not everything we planned on delivering.

Here's what we have on tap:
Improved Search - search your journal or all journals
Lots of support for 3rd party sites - details to come
AIM support in all INTL locales (AIM users can now create Journals)
Ads for all INTL locales
Improvements for Search Engines (we're helping Google find your Journal)
Additions to the allowed HTML list

Coming to Beta only:
Mobile blogging
Tagging for IE browsers

Signup for an alert to find out when we make all this is available.



yoelcrane at 9:29:06 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 6 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

I uploaded a video of Fae to the latest beta release from AOL, UnCut Video. This is really cool stuff and only going to get cooler for the J-Land Community. The Uncut Video team has enabled the "blog this" functionality on every video page, giving you all a chance to blog about videos.


Fae

For now there's a link to play the video in the Uncut Video site, but we'll have the playback embedded in the entry in the near future. Think Video Blogging, Vlogging, Vidblogging, or whatever you call it.





yoelcrane at 11:43:53 AM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

As part of the r6 rollout Banner ads will be added to all INTL versions of AOL Journals.  These are the Journals hosted on:

journals.aol.ca - Canada
journals.aol.co.uk - UK
blogs.aol.fr - France
tagebuch.aol.de - Germany
diarios.aol.com - Mexico

The ads will be the same style (728x90 banner ads) currently seen in the US version. The disclaimer below the ads will be localized for each country, i.e.
"L'emplacement publicitaire n'est pas contrôlé par l'auteur du blog."
"Werbung in Blogs stammt nicht von Blog-Autoren"

The other major addition to the International version of AOL Journals is that AIM account holders will now be able to create a journal in their respective country domain (as listed above). We'll also add a new locale for the AOL Latino brand, Ads will be  there too.

So...Why? Why would we do this again and not learn from the folks that left in Nov. '05. Well the answer is simple, the businesses are different. The folks up north and in Europe run their own business and make these calls. We've shared all of our lessons learned and have given them plenty of advice to help them make their decisions.

Your feedback is needed!

Please put your feedback in the comments section and a link to your journal.

*************UPDATE June 12th 2006******************
No ADS on UK, FR, and DE. Canada, Mexico, and Latino will have ads until further notice.



yoelcrane at 2:02:24 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 18 comments: Show Recent | Add your own