America Online testing browser toolbars and calendar functionality

America Online testing browser toolbars and calendar functionality

America Online entered the market of free web mail service late but plans to catch-up with the dominating players in the market fast. Microsoft has MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! has Yahoo! Mail, and Google has Gmail. Now AOL is trying to popularize its AOL Web mail service and is testing out a browser toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

In addition, the company is also beta testing calendar integrated in their web mail application. This new service would be called AOL Calendar and is made available to the paying AOL Subscribers and users of their AOL messenger. The AOL web mail currently features an address book and this calendar functionality would add more value to the service in the coming times.

Both MSN and Yahoo! have online calendar management functionalities. Google is also said to be working on a Google Calendar application but the company has not commented on these rumors. AOL wants to provide better functionality to their users by letting users check multiple inboxes for multiple IDs at a single location.

AOL is also beta testing a browser toolbar product for the Firefox browser to compliment the Internet Explorer version. This free toolbar would provide shortcuts to AOL content and services, such as Web search and e-mail to the AOL service users.