Portal Wars
What is this - follow Google week? I must have missed the memo.
Here's a sequence for you:
Just to be even more absurdly like Google, Yahoo is offering a beta "invitation only" account to their new 360 service. You can sign up for a beta account (which doesn't mean you're going to get one) at the 360 link to the left.
- Google introduces Gmail. MS and Yahoo up their respective webmail offerings to try to compete with Gmail's 1 GB accounts.
- Google buys Blogger. MS starts Spaces and Yahoo announces their 360 blog service is coming.
- Google runs the most successful small site advertising program in the univers. MS and Yahoo both announce that their getting into the ad business.
Where's Google in all this? Well, they're being touted as the brilliant kids who figured out how to do it all with old, clunky technology that works well on all browsers (yeah..just try to use Linux Opera to do Gmail. Not a chance).
Not all that Googles is gold, however. There is a growing feeling in the blogsphere that Google is lazy and continuosly releases half-baked programs and services to the masses and then leaves them to rot all under the guise of 'beta'. One doesn't have to Google too far to find anti-Google posts like this or anti-Google sites like this.
Wait..this just in:
Yahoo has also just announced that it is going to revamp all of its tools to ensure full compliancy with the Firefox browser. Apparently their own toolbar released for Firefox has some functionality that FF can't handle forcing its users to recert to IE. Lovely. I know, I know - 'if FF can't handle it it's because it's not standard HTML'. Whatever - I'm one of the growing hoards of people who have grown completely disillusioned with FF and am waiting for the day when everyone will get tired of its cantankerous behaviour and just die.
And finally, A9 (remember Amazon's search portal?) has recently announced that they now offer technologies that allow content providers to syndicate search results from their own search engines. When someone figures out what the hell that means, please let me know.
Wow...it's been a busy day....
Currently listening to: Someone cough
Currently reading: The Two Towers
Currently feeling: cantankerous