Pigs do fly and AOL is ready to take its chance in browsers and email war. For the moment, the pioneer of online communication promotes a new webmail service called Alto, promising to all customers (the remaining ones) to renovate their inboxes.
Revamped AOL In Early 2013
Alto, the new member of the family of webmail services, has borrowed something from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail. From my point of view, it looks extremely similar to the new Hotmail, also subject of a revamping process, making it a hybrid of old Hotmail and classical Outlook. Probably AOL got inspired from this example or simply is too desperate to figure out what to do, in order to survive.
Alto is what you would call a skin: in fact it’s a different visual representation of your inbox that works with your existing e-mail account (so long as that account is from Google, Yahoo AOL or Apple’s iCloud/Mail service, they’re the only ones compatible with Alto at this time). At least, when Microsoft passed from Hotmail to Outlook improved the cloud experience, but AOL is satisfied to make the graphics look more glamorous.
Revamped AOL In Early 2013
What’s most interesting about Alto is how it tries to bring certain kinds of e-mails into one place, like stacks of paper that are grouped on the home screen. Click on a stack and you get a grid view of its contents. Indeed, it looks to mobile Facebook now! There are stacks for daily deals, photos, attachments and social notifications. The idea here is to separate certain kinds of messages from the rest of your inbox, so that messages from really important people get more prominence than sale notifications.
AOL knows that it's a little bit late in emails' war, but tries to recover the lost time. For instance, some would find the idea of stacks even more attractive than Gmail itself. The stacks are intelligent: they are able to identify automatically which messages may come from. Furthermore, the stacks can get smarter: if you move an e-mail alert from LinkedIn into the social notifications stack, Alto will treat similar messages the same way. In the case of messages with photos or attachments, there are stacks for each one.
Alto also has a link to your calendar services such as Google Calendar and so keeps your agenda updated. Many webmail services integrate mail with a chat feature, fact that Alto can't possibly perform, not yet.
Revamped AOL In Early 2013
Let's keep reviewing the good things on Alto. For instance, if you have a signature file that automatically appears at the bottom of each message, it won’t carry over to messages written in Alto. The site is still in private beta, so it’s possible to be transformed until its deadline, the first quarter of 2013.
If you use daily Gmail, you will be surprised by another curiously good thing about Alto. It got incoming messages faster than Gmail itself. It you use it side by side, messages would appear in Alto first, while in Gmail only a minute or two later.
David Temkin, SVP of mail and mobile for AOL, admits that Alto (meaning for musicians higher) is designed to be a shortcut for your daily email experience, not a revolution. The company is aware that you have an email address and you don’t want to change it, Alto is just a door you need to open to deal with all your messages.
Alto is a client that works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and .Mac mail accounts, in a business manner, although AOL doesn't admit it. It's designed with the idea that since 95% of the general population doesn't use folders, many people get bored of the thousands of messages flooding in. And they do get annoyed at least, that's why Alto promising to make things easier for multiple accounts can be a success.
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