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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."
An IE-only interface and an integrated news client (like the one included with my current provider's webmail) when all I really want is for Yahoo to give me IMAP. I'll even pay for it, as I do with my current provider. I would switch to have Yahoo's nice interface.
POP3 is soooo 1990's.
oddpost is currently a subscription service if i read correctly. will yahoo change all those subscriber accounts into free ones paid by advertising revenue?
One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach.
This is easy to remedy: Microsoft acquires Yahoo!
MSFT could kill 3 birds with one stone - they could force all existing Yahoo! Mail users to use IE, they would gain a significant market share in the search engine market (against Google), and they'd get Oddpost as a bonus (not that Oddpost is terribly exciting).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Odpost was pretty cool, a recap of its highlights...
1) not a lick of advertising - Not any more
2) accessible via POP & IMAP - Not any more
3) send & receive large attachments - Not any more
4) staggeringly effective spam filtering - Not any more
5) Insert your favourite feature here - Not any more
here is a well hidden but useful feedback link:
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/my/cgi_feedback
Yahoo does listen to suggestions, it just takes many iterations and time.
Hardly surprising that Yahoo have done something like this really... after all, the "quick and easy" way of trying to compete with GMail when you have that much money, is obviously to just find something similar and buy it ;P
I do wonder about the suggestion that Yahoo is in any way cross-platform though. Especially considering the recent protocol change (reported on Slashdot) to lock out third party messenger clients like Trillian and Gaim. They are yet another proprietary company, so they'll design their system to run as *they* like, and if you don't want to adhere to it, tough.
In saying that though, Oddpost has only *just* been acquired, and it says on their page that they are only starting to develop the merge between their service and Yahoo! Mail, so there is more than ample opportunity to ensure all browser compatibility before the main roll out. Whether they do or not remains to be seen, but I would hope they would take the recent announcements about the insecurity of IE, and the recent 1% loss in market share into account, and ensure that their service will be more universally accessible than it's current incarnation.
Check the Oddpost tech logs for proof of Microsoft rebustness...
Why doesn't oddpost work with anything other than Internet Explorer?
I don't get it. I can see how it's annoying if you can't use something you've heard is cool. But it's not evil. I'm all for cross-platformness, but I also don't see the harm if someone wants to take advantage of some kick-ass functionality that exists in IE5W and no where else
What was the cause of that service problem?
IE no longer rapidly leaks memIE no longer rapidly leaks memory when sending message after message after message. Or at least leaks much less.ory when sending message after message after message. Or at least leaks much less.
And that other service problem?
Yesterday we resolved the MyDoom-related problems with account login and outgoing mail
And that other service problem?
After many long hours of toil, we've modified our systems to deal with the surge in email traffic caused by the MyDoom virus.
Say again?
Yikes, looks like we spoke too soon. We're still dealing with an onslaught of mail from the MyDoom virus. We'll continue to post updates here.
How your IIS servers doing?
Oddpost's performance degraded steadily over the month of November. This was primarily due to a memory leak on our IIS? servers
MS loving twats...
Using Firefox 0.9.2 on Windows, the page lacks a scrollbar but it does scroll with the mouse wheel.
Strange.
Very true - or the Picasa folks who just got bought by google!
We're working on some stuff. Soon, very soon, you'll hear of it. ;)
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.
I think you're projecting here. Mozilla / Firefox supports the same XMLHttpRequest functionality that IE does for avoiding full refreshes. There isn't anything really unique to what Oddpost is doing that couldn't be replicated for Moz/IE.
Poor architectural decisions like this were some of the rejection points when Oddpost tried to sell itself to the company I work for a while back. I guess Yahoo is less discriminating.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
- Will MS join the bandwagon and jazz up Hotmail (or provide a premium service) that does all the javascript funkiness (drag-n-drop, context menus etc)? They've already done this for exchange web access. If so, is that not kinda shooting desktop Outlook in the foot? Will they fall behind again on this New Thing due to their dekstop blinkers?
- Why do the funky interface thing anyway? A website is a website, and a lot more people are comfortable with the webforms approach to email, because it is a fairly engrained standard (e.g. their online banking is webforms based). Perhaps everyone is being led by the nose by GMail? Never! Fastmail is just one example of thousands of slick webforms-based webmails
- Besides, why not just use IMAP into your rich client of choice.
As a long-time Oddpost user, I have to say I was having qualms about Oddpost a couple of months ago. I've been trying to get off the IE bandwagon, and my questions to their (normally very responsive) support staff about Mozilla/Firefox support seemed to fall on deaf ears. I guess they were too busy doing the deal.gadgetophile.com
I've taken to designing in Moz/Firefox and tweaking for IE after that. There's typically only a few small changes (then there's the odd nightmare, of course).
The problem is more often working the other way. How many people made apps with things like XML data islands then found themselves deep in IE without a paddle?
Anyway, just another view from the trench.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Remember a few years ago how the (cross-platform) web browser was going to make the Windows desktop obsolete? We all know how that turned out, Microsoft leveraged its "advantage" in the desktop world to the browser market. But I think MS made a critical mistake in freezing development of IE and waiting for Avalon. We are starting to see some real slick web-based apps that are as useful as local applications. I've seen people here complaining that Oddpost is just a ripoff of Outlook, of course it is, but that's missing the point. What's important is that you can now get a desktop-like experience in the browser that wasn't possible a couple of years ago.
I'm using Firefox 0.8 with the RadialContext extension. That's the pie menu replacement for the right-click context menu.
If I scroll down the page with the mouse-wheel and right click, the pie menu appears at the top of the page. I have to scroll all the way back up in order to use it. ie. The context menu placement is for some reason confusing window-relative placement with page-relative placement.
It's possible that this is a bug in RadialContext, although this page with its odd combination of presentation, scripting and style attributes is the first place where I've ever seen it happen.
Why does oddpost's interface look like my old POP3 client?
Or Outlook 97. Yahoo's interface is a little cartoonish and could use some help with color contrasts (it's tougher to read on certain crappy LCD monitors), but I still prefer it to what screenshots I've seen from Oddpost.
" I wonder _why_ MS choose not to make it standars compliant?"
/. story from MS employee blog). The way I see it, we're lucky Exchange's web pages work in non-IE browsers at all. It's probably just so they can give the impression that IE is better than other browsers (if it didn't work at all, people would blame MS; however, working badly implies that other browsers don't have the ability to display MS sites).
We are talking about the company that deliberately set out to make the MS Money experience *worse* by extending the amount of time it took to accomplish tasks. Why? So they could sell more banner ads (recent