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Yahoo! Mail Beta: Better (surely) but Good Enough?
By philobean | August 28, 2007
First week of Yahoo! Mail Beta’s release months (or had it been years?) ago, from the old look and feel, I switched to it immediately. Just as quick as I did, I switched back.
Yahoo! Mail Beta was a pain to use, especially if you weren’t on (non-encumbered) broadband. Being a Filipino college student back then, Internet cafes, University hubs, and dial-ups were my primary web access points. Turns out, Yahoo! Mail Beta’s too good for so cheap a system. Who cares? My minute-long glimpse of the new Yahoo! GUI didn’t impress anyway: it looked cluttered, blindingly (and boringly) white, and took ages to load my 3,000++ e-mail inbox.
To date, there hasn’t been much progress on improving GUI on Yahoo!’s side but there have been some initiatives to improve content. For one, they integrated an instant messaging feature (Yahoo! Messenger) and an SMS feature into the system. They threw in Yahoo! Calendar and a FeedReader too. While its true that besides not making any progress on *face value*, Yahoo!’s also copied most of these add-ons from Google (Gmail’s Google Talk and Google FeedReader), putting these all together in this way is definitely a step in the right direction. Yahoo! fell back a few, behind Google, in the free webmail battlefield, but with further improvements on the product (plus, Yahoo!’s longer history in the business and its now limitless storage facility), we may soon see the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet giant make a quick catch up in the months to come.
Topics: Technology, Personal |