Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost

weiyuent writes "We all know the arrival of Gmail has initiated a new round of competition amongst the major webmail providers. Well, Yahoo! has acquired Oddpost and will be integrating Oddpost's amazing interface to strengthen its offerings. One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach. Oh well, at least it will likely put an end to Oddpost's exasperating attempt to be cute in their communication."

Comments

Not cross platform

[beforewisdom]

One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach.

It is not cross platform. They do not support the ical standard or any non-windows calendar clients. ( yes, I sent them a polite suggestion )

Re:Not cross platform

[lessthanjakejohn]

Launchcast does not work in Firefox on windows either.

Re:Not cross platform

[LostCluster]

Yahoo's Games section plays host to many third-party developed games that'll only run on Windows and/or IE.

Re:Not cross platform

[bwy]

Cross platform? Hell, their home page is not even cross-browser apparently.

This page seems to not scroll in Mozilla 1.5 even if all the content can't be shown in the browser window because of size. You know you're in trouble when they fuck up their main marketing page.

Re:Not cross platform

[metalpet]

Try it with netscape 7.
The MS windows Media Player plugin demands active X support to work correctly, so Netscape 7 has code especially written to support this particular active X control.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build mozilla/firefox with the same hack.

Re:Not cross platform

[sasha328]

Mouse wheel works, but the up/down arrow keys don't work.

The source has the following interesting snippet:

/*var isIE55upForPC = ( ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE" ) != -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "Windows" ) != -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 5.0" ) == -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 4" ) == -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 3" ) == -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 2" ) == -1 )
&& ( ua.indexOf( "Opera" ) == -1 ) );*/

var isIE55upForPC = false; // for purposes of disabling signup

Notice the "disabling signup" comment for non-IE or Opera browsers.
I do not use Yahoo, but hope they change this silliness.

Re:Not cross platform

[Skim123]

Nor can you compose HTML-formatted emails using the WYSIWYG tool with browsers other than IE... even though there exist such tools that work in Mozilla FireFox. Not that I'm into writing HTML-formatted emails, or anything.

Photo management is another one

[prostoalex]

Google bought a photo management firm today, meanwhile Yahoo! Photos changed its disk space restrictions to unlimited quite a while ago.

Re:Photo management is another one

[LiquidCoooled]

Speaking of benefits,

Any existing Oddpost subscribers have a special bonus:

Until then, all Oddpost subscriptions will be extended, free of charge. After the migration, you'll get an additional free year of premium Yahoo! Mail service including two gigs of storage, SpamGuard Plus, advanced virus protection and lots of other goodies.

Thats from the OddPost announcement to subscribers page.

I think thats quite a sweetener. gMail certainly has rocked the boat, and competition is good.

Re:Oddpost Features

[LostCluster]

We don't know if Yahoo's going to muck up Oddpost's killer features by trying to merge it into Yahoo... or if this is going to be a premium service that they're going to try to upsell their freeloaders into, at which point it may be allowed to run as-is with a much higher userbase and budget.

Re:Easy to remedy...

[Anonymous Coward]

• they could force all existing Yahoo! Mail users to use IE
  Since they have no such requirement for Hotmail, it seems very unlikely that they would do that.

• they would gain a significant market share in the search engine market (against Google),
  Maybe. MSN and Yahoo are about equal right now (link), and given that there is overlap between those groups, I'd be willing to bet that the group of users that use both yahoo and MSN is rather larger than those who use yahoo and google.

• they'd get Oddpost as a bonus (not that Oddpost is terribly exciting).
  I wouldn't argue with that -- either the first or the last part.

Re:FYI....1 gig of storage

[LostCluster]

You might want to notice the decimal point next time. Free accounts at Yahoo now have 100.0 MB of storage. A 2 GB is limit available, but it's part of the $19.99 a year upgrade model.

Re:Hotmail

[TheSpoom]

Umm...

Hotmail recently gave users 250MB of storage. If that's not directly related to Google starting Gmail, I don't know what is ;^)

Oddpost is not just an Outlook clone

[asdren]

the cool thing about Oddpost was that it was a central location for all your emails and a news feed aggregator. what I didn't like was the IE-only requirement.

Mozilla support is coming

[Ars-Fartsica]

Oddpost has stated that they are working on cross-browser support right now.

Re:Mozilla support is coming

[senzafine]

Gmail isn't completely crossbrowser either. Gmail in opera simply doesn't work (last I checked).

It's not necessarily the difficulty of making complex interfaces (dhtml...i.e. drag/drop). But realizing the return on time.

Spending 25 hours to let 8% (or less at times) at certain points in production just doesn't seem to be worth it.

However, kudos to those that do go the extra mile. I've been working on a project that had an IE only interface for about a year and a half. About 2 weeks ago we got it working in Mozilla/Firefox. Almost working in safari/konqueror. But honestly...the latter isn't worth our time at the moment.

Re:Mozilla support is coming

[prockcore]

Gmail isn't completely crossbrowser either. Gmail in opera simply doesn't work (last I checked).

It is also fairly buggy in Safari (you have to reload the page a lot). But it is still in beta.. I'm assuming either Google will fix gmail, or Apple will fix safari.

Re:Mozilla support is coming

[AstroDrabb]

But the truth be told that it still works better in IE. Not because of the code but because their rendering engine handles some things regarding dhtml better.

No, it is your code. This site works great in Firefox, moveable elements, maximize, minimized, etc.

Making it cross-platform

[kindofblue]

Yahoo/Oddpost could try to make it work on Mozilla/Firefox, etc. but I think that it requires some particular extensions built into IE 5+, to do stuff relating to SOAP and drag/drop, I think. At a minimum, some mechanism is required to talk to the server to avoid doing full web page refreshes.

In other words, porting it is not simply a matter of porting to a different dialect of javascript, CSS, and the DOM.

Therefore, Mozilla/Firefox, should have an extension and plugin that provides the same functionality required by Oddpost. Afterall, Mozilla users have already gone through the trouble of installing a foreign browser, so installing some good extensions is no big deal. Since Yahoo is very widely used, these nonstandard extensions would be very widely applicable.

The required functionality could probably be done using a java applet running invisibly in the browser whose sole purpose is to communicate with the mail servers. But this requires launching the java VM which is heavy. That's why a lightweight extension that mimics the needed IE 5+ functionality might be preferable.

Re:Making it cross-platform

[spyrral]

Perhaps, I'm not understanding what you're saying. But it seems to me that communicating with a server without full web page requests is simply a matter of using a hidden frame(iframes work nicely) and some javascript. I only poked around gmail a bit, seems to be what they're doing there to periodically get your new messages. I read the oddpost "Learn More" page, seems like that's what they're probably doing too.

All the other stuff(drag and drop, right click menu, auto complete) is DOM/dhtml stuff that all your modern browsers support, albeit in frustratingly different ways. How does SOAP come into it? Maybe on the server side, I don't know...

So what's the plugin for?

Google has a helluva catchup to do

[Anonymous Coward]

All Google worship aside, Yahoo has a huge array of core services that have been live, (somewhat) debugged and ad-supported for five+ years. It will take Google a long time to build out a network to match.

Re:Client-side 2GB goodness

[FU_Fish]

Try Fusemail. They offer an imap and webmail interface for something like $4 quarterly and they can pull your e-mail from your yahoo account and others.

I perfer fastmail.fm

[Anonymous Coward]

fastmail.fm is fast(no ads, except email tag lines), has lots of features (imap, advanced searching) and has worked in any browser I've tried (dillo, lynx, links). No need for javascript, no need for cookies and it still manages to work perfectly every time.

And for just 15 USD one time, you can have POP access and get rid of the tag lines.

Launch.com on Linux

[mrholyschmidt]

Check out the link to access Launch from linux with mplayer http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/920