AOL Alerts sends me this email the other day:

The New AOL.com is Here!
The all-new AOL.com has arrived. The next time you’re away from your home PC and want to access your favorite AOL features, just point your browser to www.aol.com on any Internet-connected computer. You’ll have access to your AOL email, instant messages, news, radio and a whole lot more. It’s perfect for staying in touch with AOL while at work, on vacation or on the go.

Except that I don’t care about staying in touch with AOL, and I’m guessing most AOL members don’t care, either. I want to stay in touch with family and friends, with business associates, with the news, with my email, with … well, you get the idea. Is staying in touch with AOL really the most compelling reason for keeping the AOL membership I’ve had since they were upgrading to 2.0?

“All-new AOL”? Seems pretty much like the old AOL with a hefty shot of Botox. Which is fine. But how about some new features? Imagine the buzz had AOL beat Microsoft to the punch and incorporated an easy-to-use RSS feed reader into the “all-new AOL.”

USA Today has an interesting article about all this, asking the salient questions: “Does it pay to become an AOL member anymore? If you already subscribe, is it worth sticking around?” Their salient conclusion: “The answers might not be as clear-cut as you think.”

As Groucho famously says in Duck Soup: “More bad news.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 12:01 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff.