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AOL's Innovative Card-Based Email Service, Alto, Comes To iOS And Android (fastcompany.com)

Posted by msmash on from the new-email-client dept.

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."

4 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. So ... folders by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Innovative ... sorts email into stacks, such as "travel," "photos," "files," "shopping,"

    So .. folders? Very innovative.

  2. Read the TOS - it scans your email for advertising by generic_screenname · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Please stop by H3lldr0p · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Remember AOL? by Chelloveck · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.