Chris McIntyre

I had seen the rumors for a while now floating around that Yahoo! was going to introduce a new mail client with RSS capabilities, but I guess I overlooked that it was also going to be an AJAX based application. For what its worth, here is my opinion.

It’s buggy. It locked up my browser (Firefox 1.5 / Mac OS X) while just clicking on a few links and the operation is a bit clunky and slow. But that is all the bad I have to talk about for the time being. I have only really played with it for a short time but seem some cool potential with it. It operates much like a desktop application should with dragging and dropping of a message (or messages) into folders. I was also able to browse and delete my mail with the arrow and delete keys. The browser auto checks for new mail so no need to refresh, it will just show new mail as it arrives. I guess I should also mention that you can open multiple emails (in tabbed browsing format) and click between them and a new message compostion window if you need to see multiple emails. The right click while in the Yahoo! Mail Beta also functions as it would in a desktop application with such features as ‘reply to sender, reply to all, mark as spam, etc’.

Another cool addition, as you can see from the screenshots, is that of RSS integration. It seems to have pulled in my ‘My Yahoo!’ subscriptions for display inside of the mail application. While there doesn’t seem to be any special support for podcasting (it just reads the RSS feed as a normal news feed) I did have a lot of trouble subscribing to Podcast RSS feeds. It kept telling me the feeds were invalid (mostly with feeds linked to a WordPress Blog).

So my final opinion: It still needs a lot of love. They are on there way to making it cool, but the hang and drag time frightened me a bit. One thing I just can’t stand is being afraid I am going to lose data…and when I hit a link or go to a new page in the Yahoo Mail Beta I feel like it could crash at any second and I would lose whatever i was doing at that point.

Kids sure are getting crazy at good ol’ Purdue. Nothing like getting pinched for a crime because you gave too much or your personal information awa to facebook. The authorities now have caught the bad guys through both MySpace and Facebook social networks.

The arrest of a Purdue University student with the help of Facebook.com, a popular student directory on the Internet, is one of the latest instances of police using such Web sites to aid their investigations.

On Saturday, officers took Justin J. Vorbroker, 20, into custody after he was alleged to have threatened another student with a pocket knife. That incident comes close in time to one in which police in Boulder, Colo., arrested six men in connection to a rape and robbery after finding their photographs on MySpace, another popular Web site.

Journal and Courier Online - News

Something about this just seems wrong. Somehow Facebook has the reputation (at least to me) as being this untouchable private community. The idea of an aquisition of such a private community is mind blowing in 2 ways:

1. The Bad: you only have an audience of 18-23 year olds
2. THE GOOD: you only have an audience of 18-23 year olds!

Business Week is reporting that Facebook has turned down a $750 million acquisition offer and is looking for $2 billion. The blogosphere is buzzing about the news.

The source of the information is an executive(s) at Facebook, which as a private company is fairly free to say just about whatever it likes with regard to acquisitions. And what they are doing is clearly playing Business Week to get the word out that they are very much for sale.

TechCrunch » Facebook is doing the Skype dance

Thanks, Nik, for snapping this photo with his cell phone in NYC of a podcasting advert on a pay phone.

This Photo taken by theFerf

You may not know this, but an octopus has a very keen sense of taste and can tell the difference between people just by putting his suckers on you. This is a little fact that I learned while away this past weekend with Amy, Chris B, Sue and Matty at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a fun little field trip we took from San Francisco this past weekend. I asked if I could get the octopus to suck on me to see if we could be friends and somehow that was weird.

Anyway, it cost about $22 a person and we spent a few hours wondering through otters, trout, octopus, penguins and lots of other fish. It was a pretty good time and was only a few short hours away.

Sorry, no photos. The camera batteries died on the first photo.
Monterey Bay Aquarium: Giant Octopus Exhibit

I mean seriously, I love firefox too, but this is a bit over the top. Oh who am I kidding…I love over the top.

This Photo taken by FlashOnTheBlog

Sending money just got easier! Send money conveniently to friends and family. Instead of mailing a check, send money by phone with a service that you trust…PayPal.com.

Once your phone is activated, text the amount you would like to send, along with the receivers phone number, to the PAYPAL number and the money will be transferred from your account to theirs. In my instance, if you text money to my cell phone number, it will get sent to my personal paypal account because I have attached that number to it. This sounds really cool to me and can see some cool things happening with this.

Dear Amy:

Stop making me work so much. According to Lifehacker and Time Magzine, all the multitasking that you make me do (and that you do yourself) is bad.

Read it >> Multitasking is bad for you? - Lifehacker

Ok. As the title says, the faces say it all with this photo. We had a great St. Patricks Day this 2006, did you? Thanks to everyone who stopped buy for Irish Car Bombs, it was worth the hang-over.

PS. If you came over after this photo, I don’t remember.

This Photo taken by theFerf

You thought you had skills. Im here to remind you that you were wrong. THIS GUY has skills. Long, choreographed juggling routine, with 5 balls. The grand finale…juggling 5 balls behind his back. Watch, you know you want to.