AOL email addresses raise question marks often: why does this person “still” have an AOL address? Are they technology challenged? Have they been in a cave for several years?
The AOL brand is struggling to right itself after years of near irrelevance. Now comes AOL Mail’s Project Phoenix, so named because AOL Mail needs to “rise from the ashes” as the mythological Phoenix does when it’s reborn. The effort tries to create what Facebook just introduced, a unified communications hub or tool where you can see all your contacts and conversations in a single place.
In order to succeed it would need to dispense with the AOL domain and create a new address (sort of like YMail to Yahoo Mail) and be absolutely fantastic as a user experience. However, of the two systems with similar ambitions Facebook’s will likely succeed and AOL’s will probably not. In a way that’s fitting because Facebook is AOL 2.0.
November 16th, 2010 at 10:58 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Greg Sterling, Regator [Technology]. Regator [Technology] said: AOL’s Phoenix Won’t Help AOL Mail Rise from Ashes (Screenwerk) http://bit.ly/bdYSjm [...]
November 16th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Hello, just wanted to point out that with Project Phoenix, users can also use different domains for their new accounts including @love.com, @games.com, @ygm.com and @wow.com