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seems like AOL’s recently shattered public image (see this recently leaked recording of a disastrous support-phonecall, or this story about a woman unable to cancel the AOL-connection of her dead father) just got another big crack today: in a blatant attempt to gain momentum among web-related research and science, AOL admittedly released search-profiles of 500.000 random customers on an AOL-website hosted at research.aol.com. the site has been turned off by now, but there are still mirrors hosting the 440mbyte download. officially, AOL is playing down the incidence, stressing the fact that the search-logs have been anonymized prior release. however, as Michael Arrington points out, even anonymized logs can easily be used to identify persons.

Jason Calacanis (AOL executive in charge of Weblogs & netscape.com) suggests not to keep any search-data at all. a noble idea, but since personalized search and targeted ad’s already are or soon will be based on user-search-profiles, I’m afraid that won’t happen anytime soon.

update: AOL’s official press-statement on the issue

update:  aolsearchdatabase.com offers a comfortable search-interface to the published logs. meanwhile, mirrors still seem to be online.

downloadsquad (an AOL-property) broke the news, that AOL will offer 5 gbytes of free online storage to anyone in hold of an AOL- or AIM-user-account starting september. the new service will utilize technology from xdrive, the storage-company AOL aquired about a year ago (xdrive currently offers 5gybte for USD 10,- a month). the featurelist according to downloadsquad and Jason Calacanis’ blog sounds great:

• 5 gybte storage, no costs for traffic (= unlimited)
• stores any type of file (not limited to images, audio etc.)
• drag-and-drop interface (I suppose that’s a desktop-app?)
• web-interface
• permission-based file and folder sharing
• online collaboration for shared files
• scheduled automatic backups (again, I guess that involves a desktop-app)

by announcing free xdrive-services, AOL most definitely has outperformed Google in the fields of online-storage - their rumoured service ‘GDrive’ isn’t even yet confirmed to exist.

in less joyful news, AOL reported a 25% layoff of their global workforce by the end of 2006.

update: the layoff-report link was obviously wrong - the correct URL is http://news.com.com/…