AOL announced a brand new homepage that will let consumers access multiple social networking services directly from AOL.com, becoming the first major portal to offer direct access to information from major social networking sites. This follows the move last month to provide access to multiple e-mail services from the AOL.com site, and is part of AOL’s ongoing strategy to open its homepage, to outside services and content– offering consumers more customization options.

The new social networking feature allows consumers to post status updates to multiple social networks at once, and provides profile activity information, including new friend requests, status updates and mail notifications from services such as AIM, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other third-party sites.

AOL.com also launched new tools and features to further personalize the user experience, bringing together third-party content and services from across the Internet. The new features give consumers more control over how content and services are displayed, letting them customize the main navigation bar by adding their own Web links, receive continuously updated local news, access RSS feeds from across the Web directly from the main page of AOL.com as well as personalize their experience with new design themes.

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