Aol to rescue its relevance with Editions? Good luck with that.


Once more Aol tries to show the world that it is still relevant by teasing us with an iPhone app called Editions; which is being billed as the news app that reads you.

Okay, cutesy taglines aside this is news finding thing and making it pleasing to your eye has been done so calling Editions the Pandora for content isn’t going to make Aol’s offering any more appealing that the two leaders: Flipboard and Pulse.

Granted the method by which it finds your news items is interesting, what with selecting icons for subject matter and then ranking them by importance, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has a lot of catching up to do, and it isn’t even released yet.

As Kit Eaton at Fast Company puts it:

Is AOL late to the game? Yes. But by using sheer muscle and its household brand-name status to attract users to its particular app, could this be a way to bring AOL back to relevance as a player in online news game? Possibly (and, according to this recent profile of CEO Tim Armstrong, that’s where the company is putting down its chips).

In some ways this is characteristic of AOL, which moves like a giant slow-maneuvering supertanker compared to smaller, jauntier competitors. These smaller firms have been able to make good headway in the App Store markets since they appear, within the Store’s confines, similar to bigger name firms who can use PR and real-world marketing to push their products. This is likely to change as the iPad (and Android tablets) becomes a more mainstream product, selling to average consumers rather than early adopters who are keen to embrace new tech. And if AOL steams ahead hard enough, as this promo campaign seems to imply it will, then it may be able to squash the competition. But that’s only true, of course, if it delivers a quality product.

Here is the video put out by Aol to promote (?) the upcoming app, or at least to let you know how they came up with the tagline.

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