AOL and Yahoo: The sincerest form of flattery?

  someone at AOL is in troooouuuuble!! 
  Originally uploaded by skampy.

My friend Dana notices that AOL's new homepage design looks awfully familiar...

One can imagine that webpages that have the same function will tend to look similar, but this is practically a pixel for pixel duplication.

It's so blatant it makes me wonder whether AOL isn't licensing the template from Yahoo or something... But that doesn't make sense, does it?

UPDATE: Actually, it is AOL's beta design. A lot can change between beta and launch, I suppose...

(Disclosure: That's AOL as in AOL Time Warner as in Time Inc. as in the owner of Business 2.0. Also, I stole the headline of this post from Dana.)

Comments

[King Spook]

This seems to pop up frequently on the internet for some reason (I've been hearing about it for at least a year...).

I don't have a specific reason why, but Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that the reason the layouts are so similar is because that form often follows function. In this case, they're both portals made by companies that offer a lot of services and have lots of affiliates.