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"There is some dead skin and dry skin you have to peel away to get to the beautiful skin," he said. With his team in place, Mr. Castro's initial strategy is to "get the buzz back in the brand," as he said last week.
He has brought some paradigms from the broadcasting world. There is a daily 10 a.m. meeting to discuss programming for the day on the welcome screen and other well-traveled areas of the service, a calendar of regular weekly features (football on Sunday, the stock market on Monday, and so on), and a budget for major programming initiatives for the fall.
"Just like HBO made a real difference on Sunday night by putting on really fabulous programming, we can increase members' satisfaction by becoming an entertainment medium," Mr. de Castro said.
What makes for compelling entertainment online is still the subject of debate. Mr. Leonsis sent a scathing e-mail message to Mr. de Castro last May criticizing his treatment of the last talk show of Rosie O'Donnell.
"Everything that is wrong with AOL was on AOL's screen that day," Mr. Leonsis said. "There was a link to a People magazine story which linked to Rosie's Web site. That's it."
"What AOL is about," he said, "is having millions of people send goodbye e-mails to Rosie and having message boards about the major themes of Rosie's shows — adoptions, gay rights and so on."
Mr. de Castro has largely endorsed the views of Mr. Leonsis and others, and such interactive features are increasingly prominent across the service. Most major pages now have spot polls on issues to draw users in.
Soon, some pages will be changed automatically to reflect what members are doing that day. The food section, for example, will display a list of the recipes that members have read that day.
"With 34 million members, we can represent what America is thinking or feeling," Mr. Bankoff said.
This focus on community will be reinforced in the new 8.0 software, due out in October. It has 100 new features ranging from improved filters to prevent junk e-mail to more choices for the color and sound of the service.
But much of the focus is on features like "match chat," pop-up windows that invite people to join chat rooms of those who share their interests. (AOL members have long listed their hobbies and other interests in the member directory.)
"We have 1.4 million chat rooms each day on AOL, but the No. 1 complaint we get is that `I can't find people to talk about what I want to talk about when I want to talk about it,' " said David Gang, who is overseeing the development of the 8.0 software.
While the new software can restore to prominence some America Online features that had been ignored in recent years, some others will be harder. Mr. Leonsis recalled a bittersweet exchange while on a recent vacation in Hawaii. A young man near the pool introduced himself, he said, volunteering that he was on his honeymoon and had met his wife on AOL.
Mr. Leonsis thanked the man, but it was a bittersweet complement. Last year, AOL sold its free online personals area, Love@AOL, to Ticketmaster's Match.com unit, a fee-based personals service.
"I would never have sold Love@AOL," Mr. Leonsis said last week. "Those kinds of services are at the heart and soul of this company."
