AOL Repackages Personal Finance Content, Names It WalletPop

AOL just launched a personal finance website called WalletPop. It's a combination of news feeds, blog entries, and a ton of calculators (which I just bookmarked in my "tools" folder). Mashable seems to like it—they write that digging through the content can be confusing, but there are some "nifty services such as deal finders and tax forms." ArsTechnica is underwhelmed:

Apart from the quite adequate assortment of calculators, it's all a big heap of plain-Jane articles slotted into categories by simple tags.

...maybe you're better off thinking of it as a fat news feed, packed with ads and a layout that can get tiresome for long articles.

AOL Just Wants To Be Left Alone

AOL Tops MSN Money's Customer Service Hall Of Shame

Earlier this week, MSN Money published the results of a national Zogby poll they commissioned on who delivers the worst customer service. The winner was AOL, ranked "poor" by 47% of respondents, while Comcast came in second with 42% suckage. Sprint ranked third at 39%.

"We've seen a fall in customer service as we've gone into a recession," says a customer service consultant in the article. "As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things." But that implies that AOL had good customer service before the recession, doesn't it? Wait, what?

Quit AOL Using Highlighters

I could not find a way to contact AOL to stop my service. So I took a yellow marker, drew a line though that line item on my credit card bill, and wrote on the bill...."Do not pay, account in dispute". I paid all the other items on the CC bill that month. It took AOL about 2 weeks to call me.....I told them what I thought of their service, and instructed them to terminate my account, while I was still on the phone. It worked. They seem to understand when you tell them you are not going to pay.

Azureus: Other ISPs May Also Be Throttling BitTorrent

A few months ago Azureus petitioned the FCC, which led to a FCC hearing in February. One of the complaints from the commission was that there is little data available on the scope of BitTorrent throttling, a gap Azureus now tries to fill by collecting data on the prevalence of TCP-resets among ISPs worldwide.

Apple, AT&T, Sued Over Visual Voicemail