Yahoo Mail Beta!

h1 Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Want to try out the new Yahoo Mail Beta? Wasn’t invited to try it out or don’t know how to try it? I found a post on makeyougohmm.com that explains how to do it for anyone outside of the United Kingdom. Just need to change your location to English: United Kingdom and get the invitation. Can always change your location back and still have access. If you don’t like the beta version then you can switch back to the current version. The new beta version is nice. Similar to outlook and can be used with the keyboard easily. Try it out and see what you think!

Google Desktop

h1 Monday, August 29th, 2005

There have been a couple of times I needed to find stuff on my computer fast! The windows searching capabilities are terrible. Bad Microsoft! I tried Google Desktop a little while ago and I liked it but rarely ever used it. I keep forgetting I have it installed. So When I heard about the new Google Desktop I needed to try it. It now has a docking capability that has plugins that can add other benefits. I have a 19in monitor so I can give up desktop space. I actually have two monitors with two computers on my desk so I can easily give up space on one of my monitors.

I’ve been happy with Yahoo’s Konfabulator with it’s widgets. Some widgets from there are very useful like website monitor and a timer. One thing it doesn’t have is a way to dock them to the side of the desktop. I don’t like having to resize my windows so I can see the widgets. I don’t want to see a widget over something I am trying to read. Now if google desktop had more plugins like the widgets from yahoo it would be perfect for me. So at this time I can see some benefits to Google desktop but it’s not exactly what I need at this time. I will keep using Konfabulator and google desktop as just a searching capability for now.

Yahoo user chat rooms closed…

h1 Thursday, June 23rd, 2005

Couple of times I’ll go into the yahoo chats and see what is up. Recently the user created chat rooms have been down. This action was probably because of a report on a TV station about chat rooms geared to pedophilia. I feel it is good for them to pay more attention in this area. They let things go for way too long. I remember noticing those chat rooms many years ago when my nieces were looking to chat on the internet. I’m glad the sponsors finally pulled the plug but they should have checked where their ads were in the first place.

The only sad thing about this is other non sexual chat rooms were shut down also. It’s been over a week now and haven’t seen any changed yet. Hope they will bring the chat rooms back. Was a good place to chat with others instead of going through IRC. IRC has been around for years, ever since the internet was born. It’s a good chat interface but not a lot of every day folks find it. When the MSN chat rooms closed a couple of years ago, everyone went to the yahoo rooms. They are perfect because it’s on the Yahoo messenger. Easy to access. That was the problem because it allowed children easy access and the predators came as well. Yahoo should just have a couple people checking rooms all the time. People who create bad rooms can get banned. It’s easy. I use to help out on a family oriented board and had to be always aware of who is who. I’m sure Yahoo can hire some people to check the room names at least.

Yahoo Messenger Beta

h1 Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

I like trying new things out so when I heard about a new yahoo messenger I had to try it. Now there are many things I hate about it and some interesting things. They are trying to get into the phone calling area. Now I haven’t tried there net2phone or the Call Computer stuff just yet. I’ll try the call computer when I can find someone who installed the beta version also. That is the biggest problem I found. All the added features are not compatible to the older versions. I can’t use the voice capability anymore.

There is a cool feature that one can drag and drop pictures in the message window and it will transfer it to the other person. Now that is cool but I of course can’t try it unless the other person has that capability. Now I am all for more features but please give the capability to work with the older versions. I have to go back to the older version so I can use voice chat. ugh. I’ll try it later when more people update or when they have every feature in the current version working in their beta version.