America Online today announced the initial beta My AOL, a personalized homepage on the AOL.com portal, featuring customized feeds for news and other web content. The portal's centralized page provides a view of AOL.com's suite of features and new Video Hub. To offer customized homepages to users, AOL has teamed up with RSS search engine Feedster to provide My AOL's RSS/XML feed capability. Users can search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds on their homepages.

The recently launched portal is AOL's gateway to an ad-supported revenue model - matching an earlier Google portal effort this year and hoping to challenge longstanding portals Yahoo and MSN.

"AOL is one of the first to make RSS easy to use for mainstream internet users. With My AOL and My Feeds, AOL is…making new technologies accessible," according to Scott Rafer, president and CEO of Feedster.

My AOL features currently include a "My Feeds" section that retrieves updated headlines from websites and offers a pre-set list of categories and the ability to add other feed-based content; RSS feeds can be found by entering RSS/XML addresses or URLs for websites, with My AOL automatically scanning those sites for available feeds.

Features that will be added in the future include the capability to search the web for additional RSS feeds and a "Top Feeds" section that will display Top News and Hot Blogs. The initial beta of the new My AOL is available from a My AOL tab on AOL.com.