Yahoo! Mail to be improved

Yahoo! is about to add two more domain names to the form when you register for a Yahoo! Mail account: “rocketmail.com” and “ymail.com” (the second of which also goes directly to the Yahoo! Mail interface). This is being done in hopes that people will use Yahoo! Mail — still the world’s leading free e-mail service, with 2 million more users than Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and more than double the number of Gmail users.

Get away from those pesky and immature usernames, and grab a more decent e-mail address from Yahoo! starting 4 PM today.

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Jott

Make a phone call, record a message, and have it automatically transcribed for you and sent to your contacts (via e-mail), to your Twitter page or blog.

Sound futuristic? Far-fetched?

Not so. Jott does exactly that, for free.

Set up your account today with Jott, and start sending e-mails, posting to your blog, and making reminders for yourself with your voice. I started using this a few hours ago, after having learned about it from a recent episode of net@night, a TWiT podcast. Jott isn’t really for people that sit behind a keyboard and monitor all day, but rather for on-the-go use, such as with a mobile phone.

One problem is that importing contacts isn’t as seamless as possible, due to the fact that I’m using Geekie.org Apps (powered by Google) rather than the standard Gmail. I had to go through the process of exporting my contacts to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file and uploading that to Jott.

Jott isn’t perfect. Sometimes, it can misspell words; for instance, “poll” was spelt as “pole”, a homonym. Subtle things like the D at the end of “noticed” might not be detected.

Try it out anyways; visit Jott.

If you’re a North American user (US or Canada), there’s a toll-free number that you can use once you’ve set up your account - 1-866-JOTT-123 (1-866-5688-123). Local numbers for a number of cities exist as well.

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Tell-a-friend alternative for FeedFlare

Those using FeedFlare from FeedBurner, such as this blog, Geekie.org, will find the “email this” feature extremely useful. “Email this” lets users easily send any page or post from a FeedFlare-supporting blog directly to their friends.

But the “email this” feature doesn’t pay… and it doesn’t give you a whole lot of options.

I recommend the FunnyTaf service, which is an easy-to-use “tell-a-friend” site that can be easily linked from any blog, including ours. Simply point a link to “http://www.funnytaf.com/share/” and the referrer field will allow FunnyTaf to determine the URL to be shared.

With some PHP programming, you can even make this dynamic, preventing problems that occur when someone’s antivirus software blocks referrer fields:

<?php
$site = ‘http://www.example.com’;
$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$url = $site.$request;
?><a href=”http://www.funnytaf.com/share/?url=<?=$url?>” rel=”external nofollow”>Share</a>

You see that I recommend the rel=”nofollow” method of preventing search engines from following these links where your article’s URL is appended!

On blogs like WordPress, this should be a bit easier to do, since the_permalink() automatically returns the URL of the individual post.

<a href=”http://www.funnytaf.com/share/?url=<? the_permalink(); ?>” rel=”external nofollow”>Share this post</a>

But that must be placed within the Loop part of the site template that handles the display of individual posts.

The best part about FunnyTaf is that, if you’re a ShareASale.com affiliate, you can earn 5 cents each time someone uses the link to send your own content to someone else.

Now, this post is about FeedFlare and replacing “email this” with the FunnyTaf link. Our dynamic yet simple implementation at http://www.geekie.org/funnytaf.feedflare.xml.php will allow you to add FunnyTaf as a FeedFlare. Simply go to FeedBurner, log in to your account, go to your feeds, choose the feed you want to apply this to, and go to the Optimize tab. From there, click FeedFlare on the left side and activate it if it isn’t already activated.

Now, I also mentioned ShareASale, so if you’re a ShareASale member, just append ?affiliate=[your ShareASale memberID] to the URL, and the XML file will automatically be updated to insert your affiliate ID. Make sure you’ve signed up for the FunnyTaf program on ShareASale, though; but it’s an automatic activation for the FunnyTaf affiliate program on ShareASale, so don’t hesitate to sign up.

Once you’ve clicked “Add New Flare”, check the boxes beside “FunnyTaf tell a friend” and the link will automatically be placed in your FeedFlare array!

If you want to customize the order, I recommend placing it first:

Don’t forget to get the HTML code for your site!

New feature! Specify your link text by appending a parameter to the URL. If you want the link text to be, as it is by default, “Tell a friend“, don’t add anything. If you want “Share” instead, add link=2. For “E-mail to a friend“, use link=3. (Really, if you’re using FeedBurner, you should know that the ? question mark is necessary for these parameters, and that if you are specifying an affiliate ID, an & ampersand is necessary.) For “Share with a friend“, use link=4.

To specify your own link text, use linktext=[your link text]. Please note that when both link and linktext are specified, linktext overrides the predefined link value.

In other words:

• link — the variable to use when selecting from the 3 alternative (predefined) link texts
• linktext — the parameter to specify when choosing your own link text (do NOT URL-encode your link text)
• affiliate — the ShareASale affiliate ID to specify

All of the above parameters are optional.

Have any ideas? Submit them by adding a comment!

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Gmail with IMAP?

Not long ago, I blogged about Gmail storage space nearing 4 GB. Now, Gmail and Google Apps for Your Domain webmail accounts have already exceeded that number.

As of today, October 26, 2007 @ 17:33 EST, Gmail is at 4417 MB. The best improvement now — and it’s got little to do with storage, is IMAP.

As some may know, IMAP is simply another e-mail protocol, in some ways superior to POP3. Very few public (free) e-mail providers offer POP3 in the first place, and much fewer support IMAP. Hotmail doesn’t support either one — they want to make money off the advertising on the webmail interface.

Gmail, and e-mail users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now benefit from IMAP access, which allows for the constant synchronization of your local and server mailboxes. When one accesses one’s mailbox through IMAP, he is retrieving an index of all of the e-mails present on the server in his account; irrelevant to what he has on his software, IMAP will let him and any other person connected to the mailbox maintain the same structure and same messages. IMAP also has some additional benefits, such as server-side searching, server-side folders & sorting, and doesn’t require the full download of every message.

The addition of IMAP is just another reason why I love Google so much. Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail all now have AJAX interfaces; but it is Microsoft that has failed to catch up. Blinded by the huge revenues they could bring in through their more corporate developments, like SharePoint, Communicator, Outlook, and Exchange, they have failed to recognize the benefits of allowing mail access through a desktop application. The reasons are simple: with so many users, there is a huge drop in ad sales if everybody switches to using a piece of software.

The most ironic part about this is that Netscape Communications, Microsoft’s competitor in the 1990’s, recognized the benefits of developing the web. (FreddyWare shares this view.) Microsoft seemed to find little potential in Netscape, but still attempted to prevent Netscape from competing (thus the anti-trust suits). Now, Microsoft must learn to move away from the online platform that has evolved with Hotmail, and move it to a system that integrates the ONLINE and the OFFLINE.

Strangely, I’ve always thought that the Internet was where the most potential lies, not the desktop.

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Gmail space nearing 4 GB

As readers all know, it was Google with their revolutionary Gmail that changed the face of the Earth.

Maybe that was a bit strong. Allow me to clarify. It was Gmail that began the innovative changes to AJAX, increased storage, online collaboration, and other things that competitors of Google have tried to copy.

One of the big things about Gmail at the beginning was the storage. At 1 GB, originally, Gmail had the largest storage in the free (though beta through invites) e-mail business. Besides the revolutionary interface, it was this storage that got people all over the world to scramble for invites.

As one of the earliest users, I know the changes that have occurred between then and now.

Google recently announced that more Gmail space was coming. But what they left for people to think about was how fast it was increasing. Not only have they gone beyond the 2800+ MB that the counter had been at a few weeks ago, but they’ve increased its speed.

The space currently allocated to each Gmail or
for Your Domain webmail account is over 3900+ MB. No one a few years ago, before Gmail’s announcement of 1 GB, would have thought we would be where we are today.

Remember the days when a Hotmail account was only 4 MB? Or when Yahoo! Mail was limited to 250 MB? Now Google has this 3900+ number, and Yahoo! Mail is unmetered (they claim to be unlimited, but there’s no such thing), everyone’s being treated to huge storage.

The greatest thing is that the same increase in space is being applied to Google Apps for Your Domain. Now Geekie.org Apps e-mail accounts, @rhhs-rasa.ca Space Club e-mail, @kingeddie.org productivity, all have huge inbox space. And it’s still going to be rising.

That’s why Geekie.org encourages people to sign up for
. Not only do you get the benefits of Gmail and its interface, but you also get word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, calendar, chat, and start page with a cool account @ your domain.

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