In a move to drive more traffic through its network, AOL on Tuesday opened its home page to other e-mail providers, including Google’s Gmail.
AOL’s mail-aggregation feature lets users access e-mail accounts from Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, in addition to AOL and AIM Mail. What’s more, the mail preview panel gives users the status of their AOL, Gmail and Yahoo accounts, so users can see new messages as they arrive. Users can navigate directly to new messages by clicking on the message link. Users can also click a link to launch a window to compose a message.
“We know that consumers today have multiple e-mail accounts on different services to keep tabs on daily, and we want to make it easier for them,” said Bill Wilson, executive vice president of programming at AOL. “This is an important first step in opening up AOL.com and giving users the ability to populate the AOL.com home page with content and services they use on a daily basis, regardless of where it lives.”
Opening AOL
The announcement comes as a precursor to more dramatic plans over the next two months to revamp AOL.com to offer more choices and customization to consumers. AOL plans to debut new features, for example, that give consumers more control over content and services displayed on the site.
AOL will also allow consumers to add their own Web links in the main navigation bar and access custom feeds from social-networking services, local news, and RSS-enabled sites directly from the main page of AOL.com.
AOL.com also debuted an extended navigation bar. It offers direct access to a broader variety of the company’s content and services. AOL.com’s upcoming additions include a “keyhole” view of social networks that will allow consumers to manage all their social-networking feeds from one location, a customizable RSS feed reader, and the ability…