Seeking Better Email

As I was writing my column yesterday for Blogging Tips, something dawned on me. That as much as I love Gmail, there aren’t many alternatives out there.

I wondered aloud on Twitter why there were no viable competitors for Gmail and got a slew of good responses. One of the best came from user @lance_ who said that “It takes a lot of market clout or money to get past spam filters. There isn’t a huge market for b2b & consumers already got an address.” (fixed quote for tweet-speak).

Others seemed to feel that the market was saturated while others still were quick to remind me about Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, neither of which really hold much of a candle to Gmail in terms of features. When you consider that Gmail, for free, offers nearly unlimited space, free IMAP access, threading, powerful search, good spam filtering and more, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail look like weaklings.

Gmail is pretty much the undisputed champion right now, at least in terms of features and power, and, sadly, there is no real competition on the horizon. Yahoo! and Microsoft seem to have rolled over and other companies, like Zenbe, would rather build off of Gmail than create something truly new.

The result is that Gmail has stagnated. What was revolutionary when it was first created has slowed to a crawl. Most of the “Labs” features are either mistakes that should never have been in Gmail, such as Signature Tweaks, Title Tweaks, etc. or outright catchup with other systems, such as Canned Responses.

Gmail, which is still in beta, hasn’t blossomed and though it seems to announce new features regularly, most seem outright trivial. So where’s the competition to keep the fire hot? Where is the upstart company with a bold new vision and a competing ideal? It isn’t there.

It’s time for some competition. Time for an upstart group of rebels to really attack this issue and see what they can do. Will it be easy? No. Is it impossible? Maybe. But the future of email may depend on it. Read more

Google: Stop Acquiring Companies I Like

Dear Google,

I love you guys, I really do. Your search is top notch, your Gmail/Google Apps is a killer product and even you Google Reader is the best RSS reader I’ve found, online or off. You guys have a knack for producing exciting, reliable products that change the way we use information.

However, I do have one tiny favor to ask you. One small, minuscule request. Can you please stop buying up companies of products that I use? If so, that would be great. Because I’m really getting tired of you screwing up the things that were going along great without you.

If you have any questions about this request, I politely direct you to the article below. It will answer many of your queries and give my reasons for thinking that the Web would be better off if you kept your pocketbook a little closer to your chest. Read more

Zune Fail? No Surprise.

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by the news that every single 1st-gen 30gb Zune had completely and utterly frozen up. I personally do not own a Zune (or an iPod for that matter) nor do I know anyone who does (makes me wonder who all of these angry Zune users are) but it definitely seems that the Web is aglow about this.

It’s a case of global schadenfreude, not so much at the Zune users, who have a legitimate reason for being very upset, but at Microsoft. After all, they made the player and it appears that it was a software issue that caused it to fail. Considering all Microsoft does is write software, the fact that they shipped a product with such a lethal bug speaks very lowly to the company.

But what did anyone expect? From day one the Zune was an iPod rip off released by a software company with an inferior record of security and stability than Apple. This is highlighted by the fact that Apple charges 2 times more for their computers than a similar Windows machine, but people are still snatching them up.

One has to wonder what those who bought the Zune were thinking at the time. It’s price and functionality were almost identical to the iPod, the latter being battle-tested and generally well-regarded. There were no new features that really made worth buying, no serious cost cuts and nothing to be gained (unless you got a great deal).

The Zune was, and pretty much still is, an attempt to compete with the iPod without doing anything better than it. The problem is that, when you’re entering a cornered market, it isn’t good enough to be equal to your competitor, you need to be better, faster and cheaper.

Sadly, Microsoft couldn’t do any of those things. In fact, it couldn’t even make the blasted thing work for four years. Read more

Fixing Gmail: How the Best Can Be Better

Gmail is the best Webmail client in the World. I get that. However, winning that contest is a bit like being named the “Most Talented Baldwin”. The competition is thin, to put it generously.

Sure, some people swear by Yahoo!’s mail offering. It is pretty and it does deal with some of the issues I address below, but it also doesn’t load on slower connections, has a terrible search function and can’t import email (seriously, are you THAT stupid Yahoo?). Compound that with no IMAP access and a paid account that doesn’t equal Gmail’s free offering, you have a rather distant second at best.

Outside of a few startups that are doing promising things with Web-based email, such as Zenbe, Gmail stands alone. There is no one out there that really competes with Gmail in this area. They were the first to introduce the super-sized mailbox for free, they were the first to use tags not folders on Webmail (Opera did it first in their mail client), they were the first to give free IMAP access and they were the first to actually put one iota of thought into usability.

But can it be better? Damn right. Nothing in the world is immune from improvement, except perhaps Joan Jett, so what can one do to make Gmail just a little more awesome? Here’s my pick of five things that can push it to eleven. Read more

Opera Pulls Out the Stops

Well, it appears that Opera has been listening, much to my surprise. It was just a week ago that published my article about five steps to fix Opera, the culmination of many years of my frustration with the browser, and yesterday they release a new alpha of their 10.0 browser, which addressed many of my issues.

Apparently, they had been listening and working on many of the problems for quite some time, just very quietly (perhaps they were also hunting rabbits).

But is it everything that I had hoped for? Well, not quite. However, it shows a great deal of promise and has a lot to offer for us Opera outcasts that have been pushed to using Firefox, Safari or Chrome because of how incomplete the Opera offering has been.

So what’s new and how well does it work? Here’s my breakdown of the latest features and how well they perform. Read more

Google, Prostitution and Paid Links

When is it against the rules to sell something that you can give away for free? When you’re dealing with sex or links.

This is the kind of hypocrisy that has always smacked me. If I can do something legally of my own free will, the reason that I choose to do it should be of no one’s interest. It doesn’t matter if the “police” are the actual vice squad or simply Google’s spider.

Yet, it does matter and very much. In the real world, at least in the U.S., being or seeing a prostitute can land you in jail and, likewise, selling your PageRank can result in a giant PageSpank.

Though I don’t think paid linking is “right”, there is a certain element here that has me worried as Google has created a whole economy around linking. Before Google, people just linked to help others find information. However, Google recognized that turned it into a search algorithm that remains the best available. Along the way though, linking took on a new significance, one that Google has done little to discourage.

But with that significance and Google’s rise to prominence commercial value became applicable to links. More links meant higher search engine rankings and those meant more customers. Google, understandably, thought this could hurt their search engine so they’ve been declaring an open war on paid linking, reducing or banning sites that participate in it and casting a dragnet that has caught many legitimate Webmasters.

The problem is that this is Google’s own monster, one created by their system. They hitched their wagon to a flawed factor of determining page value and, by becoming as popular as they did, ruined it.

Now, Google is trying to control it and doing it in a way that punishes people that try and profit from the system they created. Though Google is quick to say that they are not trying to tell people what to do with their site, they know full and well that, for a site to survive, they have to bow before the Google Gods. But they are an angry and vengeful God, even when they created the playing field. Read more

How Google Screws Paying Customers

If you use Gmail, this was a banner week for you. For the first time in years, you can now skin your Gmail without the need to use plugins, extensions or CSS hacks. This is a feature that I have been craving for months, nay, years.

While I’ve appreciated the efforts of amateur coders and some were able to create some cool themes for Gmail, they were always unreliable, especially as Gmail updated its interface, and the selection was always weak. So, news that Google had launched not one, but 30 plus new themes for its mail service had me, and others like me, dancing in the street.

But alas, my dancing was short-lived. When I logged into my Gmail account, it was not there. Even now, after nearly two days, the option is still not there. My wife is tempting me with her shiny new theme and most of my friends have theirs, but I am alone.

The reason is that I am a Google Apps user. Though I don’t pay for my Google Apps account, many of my friends do and they too are without themes, as well as Labs and other popular Gmail features.

We Google Apps users are getting a raw deal. Whether we are paid or unpaid, we are more intimately tied to Google than most Gmail users and we are getting an inferior product to those that just signed up for a @gmail.com account.

This is no way to treat your customer and is an excellent example of why Google should never, ever, get in the business of customer service. They simply have no clue what they are doing. Read more

How Google Screwed Up My Gmail Mobile

I don’t have a very nice phone. In fact, my phone is nothing short of dated. When my contract is up in a few months I’ll probably take the opportunity to upgrade networks and get a Blackberry or an iPhone. In the meantime, I’m stuck with my Fusic, a hybrid MP3 player/phone that does neither all that well

But despite my dissatisfaction with the Fusic, it does what I need it to for the most part. Call quality is good, battery life is within reason and it is capable of mobile broadband speeds. If it had a bigger screen and a full keyboard, I’d doubt I’d care too much about its flaws.

The truth is that, realistically, there are only a few apps that I use. However, the most important, by far, is the Gmail Mobile app. It is the one app I use multiple times a day and something I’ve come to rely upon.

The first version of the app was great, a flawed gem perhaps, but solid. I would use it whenever I had a few minutes to flip open, check my mail and close it back up. It was so simple to use, it almost became an obsession, causing me to check my mail any time I found myself idle for longer than five minutes.

When I heard that Google had released a second version of the app, I was excited. Already a Gmail junkie, I thought this was my chance to get an even more robust mobile experience.

Boy was I wrong.

Though most people seem to be singing the praises of the Gmail Mobile, I am singing the blues. For me and my phone, this app has been a total disaster. Maybe when I upgrade my handset my song will change, but right now there is simply no excuse for how bad Gmail Mobile has become.

What went wrong? Well, I’ll tell you? Read more

MailPlane: Not Worth the Price

I have a bit of a saying. If you write good software and charge a fair price for it, people will pay. I routinely buy software for my Mac, including programs that I may or may not use over the long haul.

However, one program I recently started to use, or rather, am starting to use again, has put me in a bit of a bind.

You see, even though Mailplane is a great program that does exactly what it advertises and is very polite with my system resources, I simply cannot justify the expense.

However, I’m not some cheapskate that refuses to buy software. I am a happy customer that just dropped $100 for Screenflow, and $20 for Gyazmail (though I have since stopped using it full-time). I’m the type of customer Mac software vendors love, a small business admin with a decent-sized PayPal account and lots of discretion to buy software I need.

Still, I can’t see myself spending $25 for Mailplane. The reason is that the price point is horribly wrong and $25, though reasonable for other applications, is far too high for this app. Read more

Next Automattic Buy: Too Lijit to Quit

WordPress search sucks. There’s no nice way to put that. If you’re using running WordPress and are using the default search engine, your visitors would likely find it faster to get the information they need with a bus ticket to your house.

Though most of the platform is great, the search has always been the pits. Unfortunately, even as media handling, plugin installation and other features have grown up and become big boy tools, WordPress search has remained as daft as a speak and spell.

However, Automattic has this nice habit of buying up companies that fix their own weaknesses. Need blogger profiles? Buy Gravatar. Commenting system sucks? Buy Intense Debate.

So, in that spirit, I’d like to suggest their next big purchase. Lijit.

It seems simple enough to me. WordPress search stinks, there’s no easy way to fix it, Lijit solved the problem for Automattic and is making a tidy sum doing it.

The pairing seems natural to me at least. But I could be wrong… Read more