Word: aol
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...AOL has laid out a number of features it plans to add during the upcoming year. The best: you call a special phone number, and a robotic voice will read you your e-mail. Imagine all the wry sig files you'll soon be hearing...
America Onliners, rejoice! With last week's release of Version 5.0--the latest upgrade of AOL's popular operating software--you can do what everyone else on the Net has long been doing: automatically append a "signature file" to outgoing e-mail. Think of sig files as the bumper stickers of e-mail--your chance to personalize your messages. While mine has always been simply name, rank and fax number, the best sig quote I ever saw was the whimsical "I'd like to die in my sleep with a smile on my face like my granddad, rather than screaming...
Some people might point out that the ability to do signature files is but the smallest part of AOL's latest software upgrade, and I suppose they're right. But it is the little things--giving people what they want--that have made America Online the world's most popular Internet-service provider. The company launched 10 years ago last week; today AOL reaches 18 million households, making it more populated than the city of Shanghai. The company claims its users are its best test bed for new ideas--that's where many of the features in 5.0 originated...
Perhaps the biggest new feature in 5.0 is "You've Got Pictures," a collaboration with Kodak. AOL users can now drop off their 35-mm or APS film at any of the 38,000 participating Kodak service centers in the U.S. After specifying that you want the service, you pick up your paper prints the way you normally would, only now they'll also be digitized and delivered directly to your AOL account. You can then create a "Buddy Gallery," which permits people on your Buddy Lists to view the snapshots. You or your buddies can download those snapshots...
...AOL also unveiled its new "My Calendar" feature, which permits users to keep their datebooks online. The idea is that you won't ever have to be worried about forgetting your datebook at work (or wherever) since it will always be available to you on AOL 's servers. This might work for you, but I don't like Net-based calendars. Computers have revolutionized the way we do just about everything, but I've yet to see an improvement over the pencil-and-paper platform for schedules--it simply takes too long to input stuff on PCs. After...