Monday, February 12, 2007

Yahoo Wants To Know When I'm Drunk And Still In A Hat

Rachel's Gchat weekend.JPG

Yahoo announced today that it's coming out with an IM program embedded in its regular email, an innovation that means users will no longer have to toggle out of one program and into another should they wish to use both simultaneously (which, as any inveterate web-addict knows, is rough on the wrists). It's an innovation, note, that was pioneered by Gmail in their Gchat program, to which this blogger has become a slavering devotee (though we have more than once found ourselves confronted with its various privacy issues). Why is it so great? Because it's EASY - providing a quick way to get information/make contact while permitting easy back-and-forth between email. It is the ADD-afflicted multitasker's dream. (And those taglines can be really, really fun.) So, it's smart of Yahoo to be ripping it off. Yahoo also recently made the smart move of re-jiggering their (previously frustratingly inefficient) email program along the lines of Outlook, allowing for quickie categorization, sorting and searching. One drawback, however: It staggers under the load of many messages, making it near-impossible to re-sort for those of us who have long abandoned our Yahoo accounts and long despaired of ever cleaning them out. The new interface would be ideal for the quickie cleanup, if only it didn't take forever to load.

In other news, MTV clips will soon be embeddable, no doubt in a move to cash in on a little of that sweet YouTube action. Here's the thing about Gchat (read: Google) and YouTube (read: Google) — they're both way out front on both these points, and continuing to innovate while their competitors play catch up. I say "their" but of course it's "its" — the All-Powerful Monolithic Globe-Straddling Power that is Google.

In the meantime, for those who are interested, my Gchat tagline currently reads "waffles!" (Explanation here.)

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Poems Are Made By Fools Like Me

...but only God can make a Marriage Japanese Dwarf tree.