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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.
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.
oddpost is currently a subscription service if i read correctly. will yahoo change all those subscriber accounts into free ones paid by advertising revenue?
Based on Microsoft's recently move to compete in search engine, I wonder why it doesn't do more in Hotmail? Does it think it has secured enough user base to ignore new comers?
:)
Oh by the way, if Google has gmail, MS introduce hmail, Apple gives you imail, Sun introduces jmail...
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.
Looks a heck of a lot like Outlook to me. I didn't know Slashdot posters were in a habit of flattering Microsoft developers.
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?
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.
Google bought a photo management firm today, meanwhile Yahoo! Photos changed its disk space restrictions to unlimited quite a while ago.
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.
I think most people have thusfar been impressed by the gmail GUI (I have, even though I've submitted a number of suggestions to Google for how to make it better)...
/. so I'll mention Opera as well) will have better standards compliance as a consequence. Note how it's mostly the less-used and more esoteric areas of standard compliance where (today) one finds most of the inconsistencies...
If Yahoo begins to offer a richer client experience for email users, then it won't be long before many more people start wanting to use both sites with a variety of browsers, and soon both IE and Mozilla (this is
Amazing magic tricks
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.
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
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.
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
Oddpost has stated that they are working on cross-browser support right now.
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...
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.
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.
Too bad you didn't write it in an evening and sell it to Yahoo! then. :-)
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
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. ;)
Why is it that the ongoing systemic outages on GMail are not reported here?
/.
Because "Breaking News: Beta Software Has Occasional Reliability Issues" is more a subject for Duh Magazine than for
- 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
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.
Check out the link to access Launch from linux with mplayer http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/920
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.
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.
Is to /. the site.
Yep, it's refusing connections as of 5 mins ago