Thursday, December 08, 2005
I'll never go back
All this talk about web applications and software as a service - with a monthly fee, all data stored online in a virtual drive accessible from anywhere. This all seems like some crazy Micro$oft-is-trying-to-get-all-my-money thing.
But one such application (if you can force it into this category) is gmail. gmail is awesome. I've never really liked the other online email programs, always preferring to have a real POP3 account from which I download and store all my email on my computer. But, probably, the main reason for this sentiment was all the ads on those email websites. And they kept getting more intrusive and annoying. It started with the flashing, and then the video and the hit the turkey to win a free laptop computer. And then, the most annoying of all, the advertisements started playing sounds. (A note to all web page/advertisement designers: unrequested sound from a web page is very, very annoying. You must not assume that your page will be the only page a user is viewing at any given time, or that they are devoting their entire attention to the web browser. They may be trying to listen to some music, watch a movie, write a paper for school, or any number of things while your page is loading in the background. And when you page starts to make noise, while in the background, the response is not "Ooh, where is that awesome sound coming from", but rather, "where is that annoying racket coming from". And then they find the webpage that is causing the disturbance and promptly get rid of it. No more sound, no more page. They may not have paid any attention to your ad anyway, but now they will definitely not patronize it. That's one definite "not a sale". Or if it wasn't from an ad, one false hit for your hit counter. So don't put any automatic sounds on your page because people close pages for that junk). So I didn't like the web based email. Gmail changed all that. They have ads, but they're not invasive like all the others. And they give you a ton of storage. And they have some really cool search features that email browsing applications don't have. And the thread view is very cool. It may confuse my dad when I send him and email of which the entire message body is composed of one word ("Probably"), but when I email my brother (who uses gmail), with simply the word "Yeah", or something like that, he knows exactly what I'm talking about - because of the thread view. And I don't ever quote the original message in a reply because it's already there in the thread view. It's so cool.
Well, I'm never switching back - I can tell you that. I'm sorry if this sounded like an infomercial. I just think that it's so cool.
But one such application (if you can force it into this category) is gmail. gmail is awesome. I've never really liked the other online email programs, always preferring to have a real POP3 account from which I download and store all my email on my computer. But, probably, the main reason for this sentiment was all the ads on those email websites. And they kept getting more intrusive and annoying. It started with the flashing, and then the video and the hit the turkey to win a free laptop computer. And then, the most annoying of all, the advertisements started playing sounds. (A note to all web page/advertisement designers: unrequested sound from a web page is very, very annoying. You must not assume that your page will be the only page a user is viewing at any given time, or that they are devoting their entire attention to the web browser. They may be trying to listen to some music, watch a movie, write a paper for school, or any number of things while your page is loading in the background. And when you page starts to make noise, while in the background, the response is not "Ooh, where is that awesome sound coming from", but rather, "where is that annoying racket coming from". And then they find the webpage that is causing the disturbance and promptly get rid of it. No more sound, no more page. They may not have paid any attention to your ad anyway, but now they will definitely not patronize it. That's one definite "not a sale". Or if it wasn't from an ad, one false hit for your hit counter. So don't put any automatic sounds on your page because people close pages for that junk). So I didn't like the web based email. Gmail changed all that. They have ads, but they're not invasive like all the others. And they give you a ton of storage. And they have some really cool search features that email browsing applications don't have. And the thread view is very cool. It may confuse my dad when I send him and email of which the entire message body is composed of one word ("Probably"), but when I email my brother (who uses gmail), with simply the word "Yeah", or something like that, he knows exactly what I'm talking about - because of the thread view. And I don't ever quote the original message in a reply because it's already there in the thread view. It's so cool.
Well, I'm never switching back - I can tell you that. I'm sorry if this sounded like an infomercial. I just think that it's so cool.
Comments:
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Hey, what do you put in the [style] block of your page to get the cool mouse-over effect in your links section.
I agree completely. GMail rocks, as do most other Google features--
href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps,
href="http://www.google.com/lochp?hl=en&tab=wl&q=">Google Local,
href="http://earth.google.com">Google Earth,
href="http://froogle.google.com">Froogle, and of course, good ol'
href="http://www.google.com">Google Search. Whoa. Looks like Local and Maps are merged--makes sense, I guess.
As far as the "where is that annoying racket coming from" comment, I also agree. When I read the post, it reminded me of dad's favorite saying when we were growing up (as anyone who ever spent a night at my parents' place in PA knows): "Do you have to make that noise?"
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href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps,
href="http://www.google.com/lochp?hl=en&tab=wl&q=">Google Local,
href="http://earth.google.com">Google Earth,
href="http://froogle.google.com">Froogle, and of course, good ol'
href="http://www.google.com">Google Search. Whoa. Looks like Local and Maps are merged--makes sense, I guess.
As far as the "where is that annoying racket coming from" comment, I also agree. When I read the post, it reminded me of dad's favorite saying when we were growing up (as anyone who ever spent a night at my parents' place in PA knows): "Do you have to make that noise?"
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