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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."
Google is good at what it does: searching and newsgroups with a few other potentially useful things.
Yahoo is good at what it does: news, yellow pages, maps, tv listings, movie listings, etc.
I use yahoo primarily for 'book' information, and google as a search engine.
I took a look at the link to Oddpost, but I'm having trouble seeing what exactly is so amazing about their e-mail interface. It looks like a low rent outlook clone.
Anyone want to take a stab at explaining to me why Oddpost is so amazing?
A clone of a standard 3 pane interface - wow. I think many of us could write something similar in an evening.
Personally, Gmail's interface is much more revolutionary. It really uses DHTML in some very slick ways to make your experience faster. Even incorporating many keyboard shortcuts. (Except CTL+ENTER=send unfortunately.)
Until now Linux has never been supported with the service per se, but it has always worked well even though they officially use a proprietary PPPoE connection. I just signed up for another year's contract and I am going to be quite upset if I have to use WINE or VMWare just to change my prefs. We'll just cross our fingers that the POP3 access will still be left intact.
"The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lye" --They Might Be Giants
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
But lets face it. The web browser is a really crappy place to work. RSS is a really interesting use of a hybrid web / rich client technology and that's interesting. Web Services are cool, but nearly unusable in their complexity if you go beyond time & temperature toys -- but the IDEA is right. Anyway, GMAIL is less impressive to this of us wierdo's who got hooked on NOTES years ago (yes, I know its bizzare to code for and feels weird if you're not used to it -- but so does PHP and PYTHON -- but its amazingly cool if you know how to make it do its thing). If Yahoo & Google fight it out for best UI bragging rights, we'll see innovation. Both companies are good at that.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Microsoft clearly cannot develop the next generation of margin-growing services on its own, and I expect them to go on a buying spree soon. Shareholders are baying at the moon begging them to use their cash to get that stock moving again.
As this dude says: If Oddpost is a clone of Outlook, how fast will Microsoft sue?
I mean it's pretty obvious that they're riding Outlook's popularity. Lifted straight from Oddpost's FAQ (emphasis mine): Oddpost is a web-based email and news aggregation application that combines the rich, responsive interface of a desktop program like Outlook with the available-from-anywhere convenience of a web mail service like Hotmail.
Seriously, if Oddpost is trying to do Outlook in the browser (errrm Exchange Web Access anyone?), and they were flying under Microsoft's radar before, then this deal will surely make Microsoft take a lot more notice.
[Disclaimer]I'm not saying that this is a Good Thing, just that MS might see it as an easy option to silence a competitor.gadgetophile.com
How is this "Informative"? Just because you and your team don't know standard HTML, doesn't mean the rest of the real programming world does not. Also, where in the world do you get and extra 25 hours? If you are worth your weight in salt, you will know how to spit out simple standards compliant HTML in the first place. Seriously, HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language and is not very hard to learn. Hell, even AOL users can put out some standard HTML.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
It's informative because my comment wasn't strictly about HTML. It was about complex user interfaces with movable elements via standard drag and drop functionality. These interfaces are much more of a pain than standard "static" layouts. Hence you rarely see them in production. Making a website behave like a desktop application with the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript across multiple browsers doesn't take a rocket scientist. But not much does...
Our code is tweaked for firefox/mozilla now also. 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.
Never did I say this was a HTML only issue we were faced with.
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Define cross-platform for me...ie on mac, safari, firefox, konqueror, opera?
... that becomes priority.
Welcome to the real world where some projects don't have unlimited resources and time. And your target audience is comprised of about 90% IE users. In terms of $
Ideally everyone used firefox and then you don't have to worry about it.
This isn't some complex table/div layout. It's an attempt to bring true desktop functionality to a web browser.
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I agree. Under different circumstances I would have liked to do that. Personally if a site doesn't work for me under firefox...I rarely open IE up to view it.
One of the driving factors for me was I got sick of opening IE to develop and use the site.
At the moment we're not very much targetting users with bad vision and blindness. The site itself is for photo sharing.
In time we want to have all the kinks ironed out such as certain accessibility issues. But we're focused on a soft launch targetting as many users as possible (IE users).
There's just not enough time in the day damnit!
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It's not silliness if they know their application is going to crash on other browsers... it's preventing themselves from having to answer support calls from paying customers who are wondering why it isn't working.
What you are missing is that this is not a mid-ninties email client in HTML. It is a present day DHTML client.
If you had tried it out, you would know that means you don't have to reload the browser window to see your next message. You have access to shortcut keys, auto-compeletion and left & right mouse menus.
It is extremely difficult to get advanced DHTML to work, even if you are doing it exclusively on certain versions of IE. There are numerous browser specific quirks (read: bugs) specific to each DOM.
There is no way you could hack this together in a couple months much less a couple hours.