AOL Anywhere, But Not For Everyone -

Once upon a time, America Online was the first and arguably the best. The Dulles-based company (back then it was headquartered in Tysons Corner) was the first major online service to offer screen names that resembled English. It was user-friendly. Its setup software was the quickest to come in the mail. It conquered the Web for ordinary people.

So, boom. Five years later the company is buying Time Warner. It's huge.

Unsurprisingly, a theme has emerged over these years of growth: AOL wants to be everything for everyone--aggregator, personal shopper, event planner, photo album, e-invite service, media player, Web browser, consumer watchdog, Web portal, instant messenger and so on. Oh, yeah, and then there's e-mail.

One consequence of this refusal to specialize is that AOL gets many things half right, too late. Too often its products are uninspired, causing it to lose its most discerning users. The remaining customers don't realize they can do better, so the service caters to lowered expectations, and so the vicious circle goes.

AOL is a populist service, though, and the thrust of its new version 6.0 software is meeting the widening, mass-market demand for mobility--not catering to high-end users or specialized uses. (The software is Windows-only; AOL says a Mac version is planned but hasn't indicated when it will be ready.)

With the advent of this software, pagers, PDAs, Web-enabled cell phones and even plain old phones can tap into online features. It's marketed as AOL Anywhere--but the delivery lags behind the advertising pitch. The pager service, for instance, isn't up yet.

And the AOL by Phone service--the AOL Anywhere offering with the widest possible appeal--is more amusing than amazing. For an additional $4.95 a month (after a trial period ends at the end of January), you get to hear your e-mail read aloud, slowly, in a nasal, computerized voice. Its ability to deliver the latest news, movie listings and weather is more useful, but also duplicated by many competitors.

The same goes for My Calendar and the expanded Address Book, which now exist both in your own copy of AOL's software and over the service itself. AOL 6.0's Address Book adds data fields for street address, phone number, Web site, birthday and others; it also automatically synchronizes changes you make off-line, on your own PC, and when you're signed on to AOL itself.

All this mobility means a barrage of e-mail, of course. Thankfully, incoming e-mail at last can be grouped and sorted. The mechanism isn't as smart as some e-mail programs, but a simple click will group mail by subject, address, date or type.

Your mileage may vary on other new offerings in 6.0. AOL Invitations is just what it sounds like--you can now track RSVPs automatically. Groups@AOL is more promising. You can share a virtual Web space with family or friends for posting messages and pictures and such, though it requires non-AOL users to choose an AOL screen name. Both feature truly goofy icons and art.

AOL 6.0 also supports broadband Internet access, via both DSL and satellite. The advent of "always-on" AOL either redeems all the flashy, slow-loading graphics or could terrify us with nonstop pop-up ads and spam. Fast Forward will follow this issue.

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Visually, AOL 6.0 is sleeker--the Toolbar and the Channel Menu have been streamlined, making the navigation and search fields simultaneously visible. Even the notoriously clunky built-in Web browser seems more sprightly these days. The installation is also less buggy; I declined its offer to make AOL my default Internet connection, and it refrained from disabling my other Internet account. But it did change browser preferences, resetting the home page in my copy of Netscape without asking or telling me first.

This wasn't the only sign of what you might call online selfishness. Case in point: the new media player in AOL 6.0, based partially on its NullSoft subsidiary's Winamp program. RealAudio works fine in it. So do the MP3 and Windows Media formats. RealVideo, however, was not supported--and since AOL wouldn't just let my already-installed RealPlayer software handle video content, I got error messages instead of that hoped-for Web multimedia. The player also looks derivative, shows no design innovation and is larded with ads.

Another case: AOL Shopping Assistant. The service's attempt to help its users through the byzantine word of e-commerce offers ratings of stores in AOL's Shop@AOL site (provided by an independent research firm) and lets you set up a product comparison chart. These are good ideas. But this assistance turns out to be far from objective. In browsing for a handheld organizer, Shop@AOL showed me several Palm-brand devices, plus one each from Hewlett-Packard and Sony--but it claimed that it couldn't find one of the popular, arguably better Handspring models.

What's puzzling is that Shop@AOL tenant J&R Electronics does carry the Handspring Visor, as a search at its own site revealed. An AOL spokesman said that it's up to tenants to decide what items to display in Shop@AOL searches.

We could imagine suspicious minds might wonder if AOL's marketing deal with Palm Inc. has led it to muscle consumers in the direction of a corporate ally. The same kind of anxiety lies behind concerns about the impending AOL-Time Warner merger: If AOL can't be trusted with little things, what about when it controls a whopping slice of the nation's media outlets?

Have we mentioned the ubiquitous advertisements? They're still here, unchanged from previous versions of AOL's software.

What's equally unchanged is how almost all of AOL's services are available from other providers: Evite.com, eGroups.com, MovieTickets.com, Yahoo Wallet, Real.com and so on. It is not a bad thing to have such services in one place; the question is whether AOL can boost each in-house service above its current lethargy to the finely-tuned state offered by the competition. The modest improvements of AOL 6.0 should please dedicated AOL users, but it's not going to convert those with more demanding sensibilities.

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