And for the vets, the bar is set high in terms of expectations.
Good luck to aol because competition is always a good thing.
Ahead of Facebook’s highly anticipated e-mail launch Monday, AOL wants you to know that it also has e-mail. The company announced “Project Phoenix,” a preview of the new AOL Mail.
The timing of the announcement is curious—noon on a Sunday—but it’s not so strange when you consider AOL is trying to get out in front of Facebook’s e-mail launch. What’s the big deal? This Facebook email effort has been referred to as a Gmail killer. If Gmail isn’t mentioned then Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are noted as potential Facebook casualties. It must irk the hell out of AOL—a company that actually had a movie named after its “You’ve Got Mail” message—that the company can’t even crowbar its way into a passing comment.
Enter this Project Phoenix release. AOL gets 45 percent of its page views from e-mail, which is a nice chunk of change. In a statement, Brad Garlinghouse, said Project Phoenix is the beginning of an effort to “disrupt email in a big way.”
Among the moving parts of AOL’s e-mail revamp:
- Quick Bar allows you to send e-mail, instant messages and Facebook and Twitter updates.
- Smart View highlights most important information on the right.
- Aggregation puts other services—Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail in your AOL inbox.
- And single click searches.
