Today my engineering teams and I are launching a phenomenal new product in beta that in my opinion will fundamentally transform how you consume electronic communications across email, social media, and beyond. The product is called ALTO and I wont lie, I am totally pysched that its finally emerging. In true “eating your own dog food” style I have used every iteration of this product for my own personal aggregation of mail accounts, social media accounts like Facebook and Linked In to name a few. I am sure my engineering teams are sick and tired of my endless “assistance” as the product has matured. But in my mind it represents a new way to manage all those online communications we are bombarded with every day.
What I love most about it is that it can be used by people like me with numerous e-mail accounts, online persona’s, and the like. It can be equally effective for the casual user with a plethora of accounts and social media interactions. It takes your digital world, organizes it, and returns control to you.
Maybe your red flags are going up already… Does this mean I have to use AOL mail? Nope, it definitely works with your AOL mail, but it also works platforms like Yahoo, and GMAIL, and more. You might be thinking – Oh I see, you aggregate everything to this new Alto thing…forcing me to lose my mail stores across my various accounts right? Nope. Your mail stays right where it is, safe and sound. However – it is now accessible in a format and a location that allows you be a powerful user of your own life!
So what is it? Here is a quick high level glance…
Here is the interface at a glance. One of the great little features that I love is that “Snooze button” on emails. I can’t tell you how often I get a message that I definitely want to respond to, but I just cant in that exact moment. I can snooze a message for however long I wish, and when the “alarm” goes off, the message reappears at the top of my mailbox. Perhaps its small, but I find it super handy.
We are also introducing a whole new concept — Stacks! Stacks are totally customizable ways of organizing your world and even allow you to create custom rules for those stacks and allow your mail to get organized in ways that matter to you!
Speaking of Stacks, we also have a few specialty pre-loaded stacks that make life so much easier… Imagine being able to search photos across all email boxes and social media platforms, and gives you an interesting and compelling set of views to go through those pictures.
The same capability is true for all attachments as well, there is a specialty stack allowing you to quickly scan through all attachments everywhere, all at once!
Get a lot of advertising and retail mails? We solved that as well by creating a special retail stack, making your deal browsing something easy and fun to do…Just in time for the holidays!
I also love the search capability that allows searching your digital life in ease. Instantly find matching messages, contacts, pictures and media, and photos.
Want to see more? How about a nifty marketing video? Click the picture below to watch the video or click here!
In the coming weeks, we will add additional capabilities and features and are targeting full commercial launch early next year. So proud of the work done here on something truly innovative and different in our space!
\Mm
LooseBolts 
Looks fantastic Mike, finally, all our information in one place. Can’t wait to use it. Martin
Game changer!
+1, can’t agree more. i’d say, you need to use it to feel it. Awesome work and cool system for your day-to-day life.
Hi Mike. I think it’s interesting. In my mind, AOL is the old walled garden company that sent me an endless supply of CD disks. With this overview, I’m trying to figure out what business AOL is becoming. It isn’t email. It is kind of similar to a number of other email consolidators, and I’m sure you know the hardships. You mentoined commercial availablity – most of the competition seems to be making “better outlook clients” for free.
Would love to understand the business model thinking, and more on what business AOL is morphing into.
Dan
Hey there Dan – I can assure you that we are no longer going to send you any CDs. 🙂 AOL has been in the process of turning itself around for a little over two years. We still have dialup users, and many of the traditional products and services you probably remember, but we have also been in the process of focusing the company on Media, Content, and Technology. Sounds like my post may have been a bit misleading by the use of the term commercial Alto will also be a free service like many of the other ones you referenced. The big difference, at least in my mind is that ALTO isn’t really a mail product per se. We are not storing peoples mail, we are not trying to manage their identities, or anything of the like. By using the existing data stores (mailboxes, social media accounts, etc) we are attempting to better organize the data that you already do store around the web. Mail is a big part of the company’s roots and Alto builds on that expertise to hopefully drive something new and unique. Reading through the twitterverse today has been interesting. The product has been very well received, and many of the things that people call out as missing or nice to haves are actually in the product roadmap. Hope this helps!
\Mm
Great work from the team Mike, looking forward to jumping in for a test drive.