aol webmail

I spent eleven years of my life working at AOL.  That's just a little under a third of the time I have lived.  In all that time, we made some pretty cool things.  We made some pretty shit things too, and I helped to make a lot of them.  The mail guys from Dulles went and build a version of AOL Webmail using a technology called SilverLight.  SilverLight is a Microsoft product that is roughly equivalent to Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash.  It allows rich Internet applications that typically run in a browser.  It is cross browser and cross platform compatible, which means it should provide an equal experience on all browsers and all operating systems.  It has just hit version 2.0, and while the first was very limited in what it could do, the second seems to be awesome.  I'll be playing with that a bit in the near future I think.

This product was demonstrated at MIX08, and you can view that presentation here.  You should be aware that this is a very technical demo, with only a few minutes close to the start where they show you the new UI.