greenthinks

Dave Winer:

I love the new Yahoo mail. It’s rapidly becoming my primary mail system. Good spam blocking, great user interface, really works on all my computers/browsers. Gmail doesn’t. And the Gmail UI is looking pretty pale compared to Yahoo’s. Now we’re in a sweet spot, possibly a very sweet spot. Two great development companies competing for our attention, and neither of them is Microsoft. Come to think of it, neither is Apple. Yahoo!

Scoble:

Dave Winer says that Microsoft isn’t trying to compete with Google’s Gmail or Yahoo’s new (and awesome) email system. Um, Dave, that’s not true. You might want to watch this video about the new Hotmail that’s under development or this one about the new Outlook Express, now called Windows Mail, that’s also under development.

I have to disagree with Scoble here. The new Microsoft Mail web app that is shown off in that video is quite cool indeed, but notice that the one feature that Dave Winer was talking about in his brief post on the subject was “works anywhere”—which, for all you Microsofties who aren’t Sanaz or Steve or the rest of the awesome Start.com team, does NOT mean everywhere that runs Windows. When Scoble asks the new Mail team about other browsers, they say that “the majority of our [must be Hotmail’s] user base is on IE 5 and 6” (by the way, I love the use of version numbers of the SAME BROWSER to make it sound like they are supporting more configs). When Scoble then asks Scott Isaacs about browser/OS compatibility for these web apps, he says “it works on Firefox.” While not awful, Microsoft needs to get its act together. The WPF/E team showed off their wares on OS X running Safari, which after all is the default browser on the Mac. If Safari is a bit anemic right now, then Microsoft should approach Apple’s team (as I’m sure they’ve done in the past) and try to solve this. You cannot have a web platform (whether it be the MSN one, ATLAS, or WPF/E) if it only runs on Wintel Machines running IE. Firefox is really important and Safari is somewhat important, and this is what Google really understands, and what from what we’re hearing Yahoo is understanding with this new Yahoo Mail. It remains to be seen, but from what I’ve seen I would pick the Microsoft offering over the Yahoo one[who knows what Google is up to], but alas it probably won’t work on my Safari browser. Maybe next time, right Microsoft?

Go check out this really awesome video!

Microsoft thinks they have a GMail killer…

It remains to be seen…

Nowhere is the answer. I just started school again (hopefully for the last time!). Now that things are on their way, I find that with today’s PDC and last week’s Apple announcements, there is just way too much to write about. I’m definitely feeling really overwhelmed right now, but I will try to pull it together and get some new posts up ASAP.

Not that it should be much of a surprise, but Boing Boing’s coverage of the Katrina disaster has been absolutely stellar. Anyone remotely interested in a slightly techy perspective on what’s going on down on the gulf coast should really head over there and check out their archives for the last week or so.

It began on August 31:

And the incredible Xeni Jardin kept it up, posting great piece after great piece, pointing us at content from the MSM, as well as the individual stories that were coming through the internet and cellular networks.

She provided background and informative analysis from experts, like in Civil Defense in Cuba and Disease Threat Analysis.

There was the anonymous message from the relief worker and the updating on the state of the New Orleans nuclear power facility.

She chronicled the horrible responses from Barbara Bush and the Army Times.

She also followed the FCC’s attempts to restore some kind of infrastructure.

Last, there was the heart-wrenching video from the president of Jefferson Parish, and the applause-earning statement from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

This is the new media. When the Lusitania was sunk, Americans read about in the newspaper. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, they listened by their radios. When JFK was shot Americans watched it on the Broadcast News. We tuned in to CNN and Cable News as the Towers fell on September 11. Let history now show that when the levees broke in New Orleans, Americans turned to the internet and to a new breed of journalist – a journalist who has as much heart as she does guts, and a journalist who isn’t afraid to publish something controversial, but is equally unafraid to correct her reports when new facts are brought to light.

We are living in a bright new age of technology and communication, all the while the world around us becomes darker and more dangerous. Let us continue to build this new transparent communications network as it makes weathering the gathering storm just a little bit easier.

From Boing Boing...

FEMA to Mac, Linux users: drop dead: A stupid usability flaw in the FEMA website is causing frustration for some of the Hurricane Katrina survivors fortunate enough to have computer and internet access. Bottom line: if you’re not using Windows + IE, it appears that you won’t be able to file a disaster assistance claim on Fema.gov.

Absolutely unbelievable.

(or why Google Talk is really not ready for primetime)

Many people were disappointed with Google Talk. There was an expectation that Google was going to redefine this sector of the internet as they have done with so many others. Alas, it was not meant to be. Although, if they’re master plan calls for the other three major IM players to break down their walls and allows IM to enter the real mainstream by enabling users to converse with anyone across the networks, then perhaps this was the plan all along. After all if they had just wiped the floor with Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, the chances of those big 3 sitting down at the bargaining table might be much less than it is right now.

But that was not really my point in any case. I tried to like Google Talk, I really did. I read Steve Gillmor’s nicely surrealistic post about how it made his PC feel like a Mac, but it just did not work for me.

Then this happened. I tried sending a link from Adium:

and this is what showed up on Google Talk:

So, this nice simple Google IM app cannot understand a link tag? If I cannot even send a link to a GTalk user, it really is quite useless.

Update: Yes, Google Talk can indeed display URL’s as links, as you can see here:

However, that simply is not good enough when every modern IM client makes it super easy for even the novice to send a link as a link to someone. ahref is NOT that complicated and the fact that the Google guys left it out leads me to believe that they are not really using this (or at least not the public version of the tool) for work, as was claimed.