The latest move in the war for user’s email box comes from Micrsoft. Last week, Microsoft announced custom domains, through a blog hosted by the custom domains team. To summarize
- You can register your domains anywhere
- You can host your domains anywhere
- You can have your email@ your domain hosted on hotmail for free
- Microsoft makes money by showing ads
- More importantly, they will give users (some) a reason to switch to hotmail.
The free email market is fairly mature and there is limited opportunity for any player to take significant market from another. Last year, gmail really changed the game by upping the disk space. With the other players increasing disk space significantly, we are back to the equilibrium.
This move by microsoft is attacking the next opportunity. Traditionally, email folks saw domain names as a “premium” service. Something users are willing to pay extra. Now, microsoft is willing to trade revenue from the premium service (which i bet was tiny) to more usage. Clearly, this is not as impactful as gmail’s 1G storage, but, an important move nonetheless.
I love this move. This is great for consumers. I have few domains of my own. I don’t really want to be forced to host my entire website with yahoo to get yahoo email. I want to be able to choose best webhosting for my site, best email hosting for my email. I used my ISP’s email hosting and they do a decent job. However, all the ISPs I hosted with fail quite badly with spam prevention. Here is where i was hoping the either yahoo, gmail or microsoft offer products. Now microsoft does. I hope Yahoo will match them soon.
I think the next step in this trend is to offer to ISPs a bundled service. So, joe-blo ISP can host the website and run the front end. They can however choose to outsource the difficult email hosting to a free email provider for a nominal share in the web hosting fees. It would be great to get a web hosting with dreamhost coupled with gmail as your email.
http://manjunathshanmugam.blogspot.com/
I would like to post more of my collected thoughts on this matter at a later time. The story is too shocking.
The story of manjunath shows us how barbaric parts of our society are. We have a rich culture of 5000 years. Sometimes, it feels that we still are in a society that hasn’t evolved.
Charlene Li of Forrester research had this interesting page about “3rd page of search”.
Her primary observation was about intermediaries. Folks who aggregate content on the web and SEO it to rank high in google results. Her hypothesis is that businesses will be built around become the 3rd page of search. That is, vertical search products draw traffic from web search products.
I thought about this a little bit. If i am building a web search product (disclaimer: I am not part of search core team), here would be my goals
Fundamentally, web search products are interested in getting user to their goal without the 3rd page of search. They will invest and are investing huge amounts to eliminate the need for it. As the crawling, extraction techniques advance, the big web search engines will be able to avoid pointing to the “3rd pages” which have limited value add other than Search Engine Optimization.
This is not to say vertical search companies are dead. But that they are competing with Google, Yahoo, MSN. This is not going to be a happy eco system, where GYM will encourage vertical search companies. To the extent that the vertical search companies provide aggregated, search engine optimized pages and nothing else, they will be eliminated quickly.
I had the post written till above last night and i didn’t publish it. This morning, I found out that Google Base is launched. To me google base validates what I was trying to say above.
Want to work for yahoo! in our team? We are the team that built Events Browser and some of the cool technologies that powered it. We have one more opening in our team.
Chad Dickerson has the job description on his site. Basically, we are looking for senior web technologists. If you have been working with web apps for a while (>5 years), write us.
I was looking at the awstats output for my website (www.dronamraju.com). Interestingly, visitors to my site tend to use firefox and mozilla. Those browsers command ~50% of the share, with firefox accounting for 38.5%.
I wonder if this is because my blog is read predominantly by firefox friendly folks? What does that say about me?
In related stats, I notice that more bloglines users subscribe to my non-stock blog than to my stock blog. The numbers are exact opposite to what I see with my yahoo. On Bloglines, my non-stock blog subscriptions out number my stock blog subscriptions by 10 : 1. On My Yahoo!, 3 times as many folks subscribe to my stock blog.
I wonder what this says about users of bloglines & my yahoo
NOTE:Geopress 2.0 is now available. Please use that instead of this plugin.
Much has been said about how awesome the new maps is. I personally think that the maps launch is awesome for what is enables in the future. Tons of apis were released along with the new maps product. Rasmus has a cool tutorial that explores a lot of the apis. I have to agree with rasmus that geo-coding the killer app.
Here is my first wordpress plugin that uses Yahoo! Maps geocoder to allow you to tag your posts with a lat/long. List of features:
Download the GeoPress plugin powered by Yahoo! Maps.
UPDATE: New Version is out for geopress that adds saving your favorite locations! Link above takes you to version 1.1
Update - 11/10/2005: Added a options page for GeoPress. Now you can customize the embeddable map size. Download version 1.2 (same link above) to get the new plugin
Update - 11/12/2005: Crossed 100 downloads for geopress yesterday! Also started brainstorming about next major version of geopress. Seems like most people want scrollable, zoomable AJAX maps.
There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 - “web as a platform”. Enough has been said about what web 2.0 means, what being platform is. Quite of few us here in our immediate team(s) have been talking about web being a platform for development. As luck would have it, some of us have also been tasked with developing some key web api services for yahoo.
We started exploring ideas for a demo that would test(push) some of the apis we have been developing - and quite fortuitously - we ended up with a demo we think is rather cool and illustrative of web being a platform in a real, meaninful sense.
I know what you are thinking, Yet Another Mashup Meme - YAMM.
There is a lot of mashup meme going on right now. Russell Beattie’s rant here questions the value created by most of the mashups. He brought into open a lot of questions people were having as they saw mashup after another doing very similar things and not pushing the boundaries. Joe Krause referred to the “froth” in start up market in his web 2.0 panel and asked folks to think if some idea is a feature, product, or a business.
Most of the apps we use on a regular basis (desktop or web 1.0) are built on top of several apis, data sets, widgets & services. It is very rare to see a really useful, powerful application use 2 services. Most mashups
though are doing just that. They use some data source overlayed on maps.
As I mentioned before, we have developed an events browser - mainly as a way to improve our api design - but quite accidentally ended up with a true AJAX app. While this app is anchored on the new yahoo! maps AJAX API, the core functionality is built using several widgets, various yahoo! API services including the Term Extraction API. Infact, the usage of term extraction api shows how we can connect information available on the web better. Ed goes into more detail about the coolness of the app.
The more I look at this demo, i remain convinced that we are just begining to explore the possibility of web as a platform.
A lot of credits should go around for this app. Kudos to chad, ed, jonathan, karon, nate, raymie, sam, toby for making this happen!.
Update:
Events Browser is getting picked up by quite a lot of folks. jeremy has list of folks talking about the new maps in his blog post. The list below is folks who talk about Events Browser.