2010 Year-End Look At Email

First, here's my all-time favorite spam email of the year, from early December 2010...


Hotmail
Hotmail is now one big Microsoft Silverlight object, like their Webmaster Tools. Silverlight is a Flash-like plugin used on some sites for playing videos. Some browsers handle it better than others, to put it nicely. Sad. There was a massive Hotmail account hijacking over a few weeks in November, which sent spam to all contacts, with links to malware sites. There may have been password theft from elsewhere. My account wasn't hacked. Hotmail works fine if you are gentle.

Gmail
Google continues to merge every product they have into one. No longer can you just have a Gmail account, you now have a "Google Account" that instantly sets cookies to log you into everything Google owns, from Blogger to YouTube, whether you like it or not. They thrust Buzz right into the mail interface, and insist you create a public "Google Profile" so they can continue brutal attempts at building a "social network" for some reason. Gmail itself is decent, I wish they'd leave it alone. Google already reads the actual content of your emails in order to show you ads. And while they may not directly "rent, sell or share" that data, they don't seem to care about the theft of it. I'll have no problem dropping Gmail in 2011 if it gets any more intrusive.

Yahoo
Yahoo has a simple and fast email system. When Hotmail was redesigned into the current Silverlight interface it basically stole the clean look of Yahoo Mail. Not much to say, other than Yahoo is struggling financially. There are rumors Yahoo may sell Flickr and/or other businesses it owns, but it's unlikely anything will change with their email. It's not like an email platform is worth money in itself.

Excite
I've been using Excite email for many years. It's been through overhauls, outsourcing, and some scary interface changes, but has come through it intact. (Parent company IAC Media also owns Ask, Dictionary.com, Vimeo, and a ton of others.) A bit slow to load, but an acceptable free email service.

Other
Will Facebook messages kill email? Nope.

Stats: Browsers Used By Visitors To Our Sites

Here's a current look at the browsers being used by visitors to the heaviest traffic sites that we operate. No big surprises with Internet Explorer leading the pack, followed by Firefox.


Without saying too much about our clients, trust me when I say this traffic is very broad in scope. These statistics reflect traffic to sites in many unrelated industries, with very different target audiences and user demographics (from highly educated specialists to random consumers, and from world-wide to Peterborough-specific).

Quick Update of Big News

Here's some of the biggest news of the past couple of weeks:

Facebook is implementing real-time search, and also just acquired FriendFeed.

Yahoo & Microsoft have formally announced plans to merge their Bing and Yahoo search services somehow. Everyone has seen this coming, but they've finally confirmed it.

Google's Webmaster Central team says of the "Caffeine" update: "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." As with every algorithm update, confusion and bizarre assumptions abound. Now Matt will spend a few weeks answering dopey questions as usual.

Project Natal, HTML books, Yahoo ranking...

If you haven’t seen demo videos of the Xbox 360 Project Natal controller, here’s a YouTube link - Project Natal/Milo demo

Is this thing practical? How many similar devices have come and gone since the eighties? Sure, the graphics are better than ever before, but why is this different than all the other really cool gadgets that never caught on? They're going to have to innovate games unlike anything we've seen before. Personally, I think the gaming industry needs to evolve past shooters and driving games anyway.
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If you happen to be new to web design, forget online tutorials, start with an HTML book by Elizabeth Castro. Look for the "Visual Quick Start" series. You’ll have a great understanding of the basics in no time, and be ready to move on to intermediate stuff after a week or two of playing around with what she shows you. It's excellent foundation material, and the books are handy references.
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We hear enough from Google, so here's a candid interview with Laura Lippay of Yahoo - on WebProNews