Reverberations

This another top ten list -’The Top Ten Lies of Engineers‘ by Guy made me smile and realize that it’s funny because it’s so true.

“This time we got it right.”

Paul Boutin at Slate says -

YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They’re easy to use, and they don’t tell you what to do.

And I agree.

Even personally I prefer YouTube much more to Google Video, though Google Video lets me download clips. Besides, Google Video wasn’t even available here in India at its launch ( It is now).

[Google's] Orkut is one big monolith, which looses its usefulness and relevance beyond a point - the same problem with most of the ’social’ networking sites. We built all those ’social’ networks and then what!

Yahoo! mail beta has been talked about much. So I was waiting to get my hands on it. It didn't come the straighter way, but through a trick mentioned at GoogleOS blog.

To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, France or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should see Yahoo Beta. If you don't see it, go to options and click "Try Beta" button. That's all.

Somehow, UK wasn't available, so I had to max out my linguistic skills to wade through Yahoo! German :-).

Willkommen zu der Beta-Version des neuen Yahoo! Mail!

I'm on Yahoo! mail beta now. The new Yahoo! mail is yet far from finish though. The interface looks slick, but loads a bit slowly, and I even got one alert window (usually placed for debugging etc). So it's alright that yahoo! is rolling it out slowly. The Outlook-ish three-pane view is the highlight of the new service, and it works perfectly on Firefox.

*ROFL* - Link

I’m a bit under-informed* to put up an opinion of my own about this entire discussion over the term ‘user-generated-content’ being inappropriate etc. So, how about ‘People-powered’, ‘Authentic media‘, even ‘Unpaid Freelancers‘. Oh, The Name popping all over.

The other day, there was an article about headlines being written for search-engine bots and the decline of creativity. Not really!

*Busy?

Okay, I’m out of Google Sandbox :-), I’ve a PageRank now. It took almost two months.