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AOL's Innovative Card-Based Email Service, Alto, Comes To iOS And Android (fastcompany.com)
Remember AOL? The company best known for its email service? Three years ago, it released a Pinterest-like platform for desktop email called Alto. Today AOL announced the release of Alto for iOS and Android -- nearly a year after it began beta testing it. FastCompany writes: The app's design is based on the idea that email has shifted from a communication tool to more of a transactional system -- today's inboxes are filled with receipts, order confirmations, and reservations, rather than personal messages. To combat this flood of data, Alto automatically sorts email into stacks, such as "travel," "photos," "files," "shopping," and "personal."
if it is, I might just have to love AOL for the first time
> Innovative ... sorts email into stacks, such as "travel," "photos," "files," "shopping,"
So .. folders? Very innovative.
I must be a super genius tech entrepreneur and didn't know it...
To see just HOW innovative this idea is, MH had folders, and even subfolders, by 1979. Also, certainly by 1990 procmail was automatically putting mail into different folders. I have no doubt other commenters will point out much earlier implementations.
a Pinterest-like platform for desktop email
That's about as appealing as a Jon Katz platform for news articles.
AOL's own Google Inbox, eh? Very original and innovative.
AOL is still trying stay relevant. Google on the other hand has had similar functionality for almost 2 years now.
I used it for about 3 months then just went back to regular Gmail.
What they can do is take advantage of the Verizon subscriber base and add 'Alto' as a bloatware app to get eyes on it and sell services, impressions, or whatever else through it.
According to the TOS, and common sense, this is scanning your emails to serve you ads. Granted, Gmail does the same thing, so maybe no one will care. It is still worth mentioning.
I really don't know where to begin. This is another reinvention of the wheel. Something I'm seeing more and more of these days. Don't know if it's because I'm approaching a certain age or if communication is just happening faster and faster so we see more of it in a shorter amount of time.
Don't think I'm knocking it. I'm not. It's obvious someone needed this and didn't know how or where to look for the contemporary counterpart in current clients. Or because current clients made it too hard to figure out. We all have different brains and think our process out differently. Just because it's obvious to you or I how to script this in our gmail doesn't mean that everyone else sees it that way.
What bothers me is the breathless headlines. The purposeful exaggeration. The constant commercialization. That, more than anything, I'm tired of.
No wonder advertisement is in trouble.
and they fail miserably, more often than not mis-classifying everything that comes in, making your life 100x less productive
email is still , and will always be, just a communication tool.
I can't wait to see it preinstalled on their DROID and prominent. Hopefully Verizon can also put every one of AOL's crappy news sites that have an app in them so each phone comes with a full hundred apps you can't get rid of.
Never heard of this. Although I do remember AOL from back in the days when it was exclusively a walled garden, and almost everyone subscribed to one or more of a variety of walled gardens. CompuServe, *Prodigy, etc... I was late in the game when it came to the likes of enjoying Archie, Veronica, WAIS, and so on... I remember waiting for the upcoming, world conquering Xanadu that was going to knock the block of this web thing.
*I remember having fondness for Prodigy in all of it's 320x240 glory over anything else. Unless you wanted to cyber. That was AOL and I can't believe I just said that.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Yes Google has had this for about 2 years... and I've had it disabled for exactly as long.
#DeleteChrome
You guys heard of "Google Inbox"? Or Gmail's native tagging that has been around for years? :^)
Also I hate "cards". I've tried to like Google Now and Android Wear, but anytime I hear "cards" I think "information that I would never open Google Now for in hopes of accidentally finding". Further, I don't think I'd ever open Google Now.
Want to know the weather? Better open google now and hope google thinks I care what the weather is right now.
No, AOL has invented named folders.
Mind. Blown.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
I must be remembering the wrong AOL. The one I remember was best known for sending unsolicited floppy disks and CD ROMs in the mail.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The only way you will be able to trust any kind of AI for sorting personal information will be if the software is something you buy and own.
But any AI development will be built around monetizing your information, so they will always be "free" and untrustable.
I'm a little surprised that the moderator/poster pulled up a Pinterest reference. Is Pinterest useful or profitable at this point? The much more closely and understandable reference is Google Inbox or just folders in general. Do not want.
Hides things in folder, miss-classifies them and doesn't return the same search result twice.
When people say they are going to make your life easier, you can bet they are just going to fuck it even more.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
All this talk of AOL and nobody mentions that Verizon bought it?
So it's Verizon scanning your email.
BTW, I do know ONE person who prefers Google's Inbox to the regular.
Each email you get comes on a daily AOL CD
...is MH?
Today, MH is mostly relevant for the same reason pkzip is - it's storage format is used by many, many other programs. Most imap servers and email clients can use MH format and the derivative Maildir to store mail. So it's kind of like the zip of email storage.
It just feels weird to have "AOL" and "innovative" in the same headline without a "not" or a "was" in there somewhere.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes