I just wanted to remind all of you (in case you didn’t already know this) that Yahoo! is now making available two new email domains - ymail.com and rocketmail.com. Yahoo! Mail has been around for so long that there’s really no possible way for you to get the email address that you really want. Thus, Yahoo! is hoping to solve that problem with the addition of two new domains.

To sign up, just go to either ymail.com or rocketmail.com. They will both redirect to login.yahoo.com and you’ll be able to sign up for the new email addresses. Also note that ymail.com and rocketmail.com uses the same Yahoo! Mail user interface.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Yahoo! Mail, Ymail, rocketmail

Hey Krunker readers - if any of you are Twitter users, you can follow Krunker at http://www.twitter.com/krunker

Feel free to add Krunker to your account and we’ll get the conversation going! (as long as there’s no downtime at Twitter of course)

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Krunker, Twitter

I missed this one this morning but apparently both the U.S. and U.K. site for Amazon.com went down again. Web surfers trying to go to Amazon.com were witnessing the same “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” message for some time (an outage also occurred Friday morning). According to News.com, the site is now back up but as usual, Amazon is not saying a thing. Now if Amazon was the only one affected by such an outage, then not saying a word would be generally OK I suppose. However since users are also running full fledged businesses on top of Amazon.com, it seems rather absurd that these very same users aren’t notified of what exactly went wrong. If it’s a DDoS attack - say so.. admit to it - there’s nothing necessarily wrong about that. If it’s an engineering error - say it. Own up to it.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, outage

Sweetness! The city of Los Angeles has filed a lawsuit against Time Warner Cable accusing the company of “unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent business acts and practices, and deceptive advertising.” According to CNET’s News.com, the lawsuit claims the company has subjected subscribers to “delayed repair appointments, deceptive pricing, and Internet outages.” Los Angeles City attorney Rocky Delgadillo is seeking $2500 in civil penalties for each violation. Go LA! (ah yes.. there is a God out there)

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Los Angeles, Time Warner Cable, Lawsuit, Rocky Delgadillo

Here’s some not so good news - especially for folks in Beaumont, TX. Time Warner Cable will begin trials of Internet metering for customers in the city of Beaumont TX. TWC customers will have monthly allowances that they’ve pre-paid for and anything over that limit will be charged at a rate of $1 a gigabyte. According to Time Warner Cable, metered billing is a way to handle uneven Internet usage among its customers. They claim that five percent of their company’s subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines. According to this AP report, metered usage is fairly common overseas but definitely not here in the U.S. More and more cable companies are looking to see how they can bring such price structures to the U.S.

The proposed tiers will be the following:

• $29.95 per month for 768 kbps service and 5GB monthly cap
• $54.90 per month for 15 mbps service and a 40GB cap

That sounds like a lot huh? Not so fast. Considering that the Internet is increasingly moving towards “rich” content - 40GB of content (let alone 5 GB) will easily be surpassed. If you do the following:

• Rent and download HD content via Xbox Live, Apple TV, etc - you’ll be affected
• Upload and share multimedia content - you’ll be affected
• Play online games - you’ll be affected
• Have a home-based business that depends on the network - you’ll be affected

The list goes on. In a world where more and more limitations are being lifted from computing resources, putting restrictions around bandwidth seems like a giant step backwards.

Cable companies argue that they need to do this to reign in the abusive customers. Here’s an idea - upgrade your infrastructure instead. With the growing prices for cable bills, let’s consider putting some of that revenue back into building out an effective infrastructure. Look at the phone companies - heck… as much as I dislike Verizon at times - look at them and their FIOS network.

Should Time Warner Cable continue to expand metering to the rest of the country, you can be sure that I will leave the service immediately. DSL - I  might come back after all!

[Check it out via PC World]

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Yahoo and McAfee have teamed up to try and make the web just a wee bit safer to peruse. The online portal will use McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to label potentially “unsafe Web sites” that might appear within Yahoo’s search results as “risky web sites.” Things that might make a website “risky” include sites that host malware, virus infected downloads, links to other websites that have similar content, or have a track record of harvesting e-mail addresses for spam purposes. The McAfee/Yahoo partnership is a multi-year deal which could lead to McAfee technology being used in other Yahoo products such as Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Mail currently uses Norton Anti-virus software protection to scan e-mail attachments etc. Yahoo is also actively removing web sites from its search index that are identified as using “drive-by-download” attacks. These are attacks that are launched simply by visiting a website. You can read more about what Yahoo and McAffee are doing on this News.com article (as well as what Google is doing to protect search users).

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, McAfee, Anti-Virus

Feeling a little lost with the whole Yahoo - Microsoft - Google - News Corp - AOL tangle? Don’t worry - a lot of other people are too. Yes Microsoft is still trying to get at Yahoo! and yes.. Yahoo! is still trying to sweeten the deal by 1) rebuffing Microsoft and 2) enticing other folks to be interested in the company - such as Google and AOL.

A flurry of activity happened over the last day or so but you can see a quick summary of it all over at News.com. Here’s the short end of it all.

1. Yahoo! announced that they were going to use Google for paid-search ads (which I find so damn ironic given Yahoo’s purchase of Overture.com several years ago - the ones who made paid-search work in the first place).

2. This was followed by reports that Yahoo! and Time Warner were doing the dirty dance.. and perhaps Yahoo! absorbing the AOL unit from Time Warner and TW receiving a 20 percent stake in Yahoo!

3. But wait.. there’s more! Now there’s word that Microsoft might be teaming up in a joint bid to purchase Yahoo!. The deal would supposedly bring together Microsoft’s MSN unit, Fox’s Interactive Media Unit and of course Yahoo!. Consider the possibilities there folks. MSN + MySpace + Yahoo! .. now that would be interesting eh?

While all of these combinations could definitely come to fruition.. I can’t imagine the sum of these parts being better than the original individual units. Microsoft, News Corp, and Yahoo! is a totally mish-mash of cultures. Imagine integrating the units? Combine folks in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle into a cohesive unit.. oh yes.. have two different companies be the partners managing the unit. Yeah - that’s recipe for a working scenario eh? I don’t think so.

But what about Yahoo and AOL with a little help from Time Warner? Let’s be honest now. What does AOL really bring for Yahoo!?  As the years go by, AOL becomes less and less of a player and more of a has-been. Sure there are still millions of AOL subscribers now but it’s not a growing subscriber base. A synergy with Time Warner might be interesting from a content perspective for Yahoo but.. wait.. isn’t that what they’ve been saying for YEARS now with AOL and Time Warner? How is this different? Plus with Yahoo! trimming itself down by ridding itself of business units that didn’t make money - does it make sense to offer media services like this again?

IMHO - the best way to fight Google to be like Google. Be innovative. All of these companies are simply trying to play “catch-up” to Google and guess what? They can keep on trying and Google will keep on running ahead of them. Combing Yahoo! Search and MSN Search won’t create a bigger search property than Google Search. Combining the user communities of Yahoo and MSN won’t necessarily create a business that competes well with Google.

First and foremost, the companies need a singular vision of execution on the Internet. They need to make consistent service offerings, consistent product offerings, easy integration paths, and most of all - be innovative.

It’s clear that it’s possible to usurp a leader if you execute correctly. Having said all of this, I do believe that a Microsoft and Yahoo! combination COULD work. That deal makes sense because Yahoo! executes fairly well on the Internet (though not great obviously) while Microsoft’s MSN properties have been third rate for years. If the acquisition were to happen, the key to success would be execution and innovation. The ability to come out with compelling solutions - not just “me too” solutions, and the ability to execute on delivering them.

Ok.. I’ve said my peace. ha

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, News Corp, AOL, Time Warner

Interested in knowing more about the upcoming rollout of Facebook Chat? Check out this hands-on look at Facebook Chat over at Webware.com. The service is currently in beta and is slowly being rolled out to some networks on Facebook (The folks in the Harvard network are already getting this feature supposedly). Facebook Chat won’t be for everyone though. The app will work only within IE 7, Firefox 2.x, and Safari 2 on the PC, and Firefox 2, Safari 2, and Safari 3 on the Mac.

The real question is - will Facebook Chat improve user “stickiness” on Facebook? Maybe.. if at least in the beginning. As the article points out, it’ll certainly be great for users to easily reach out to old classmates or friends from far yonder. However, I also see the following happen:

You: “Hey - long time no chat!!! nice to see you here on Facebook!”

Friend: “Totally! It’s been forever!”

You: “Do you have AIM, Yahoo, MSN or Google Talk?”

Yes.. my point is - there’s just one too many chat clients out there. If Facebook were to enable support for third party instant messenger clients, then we’d be talking! (Facebook Chat would also be a major competitor to meebo too!)

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Technorati Tags: Facebook Chat

Looking for some free online storage? Why not give Microsoft’s new Windows Live SkyDrive service a try? (Although yes.. we are talking about Microsoft here.. but oh well!) The company removed the “beta” tag from the SkyDrive service on Thursday and upped the amount of storage space available for each user to 5GB. If you have a Windows Live account, you automatically have the SkyDrive service available already. You can create personal folders, shared folders, as well as public folders that everyone else can view. Clearly, online storage is a key component to any large scale Internet portal offering and thus it’s critical that Microsoft offer the SkyDrive service to Live users.

I took SkyDrive for a brief spin just a moment ago and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Windows Home Server user interface (and that’s not a bad thing either!). Again, there are three sections - Personal Folders, Shared Folders (shared with friends), and Public Folders (shared to everyone on the net). By default, you get four personal folders - Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos but you can create additional personal folders as well as folders within the default four folders. Each folder can have specified “readers” and “editors”.

You can upload files one at a time or use an ActiveX component to drag and upload files to the service. I prefer the ActiveX component since it’s far easier to use if you’re dealing with a large number of files. If I have one complaint thus far, it’s not being able to easily move files from folder to folder within the online storage service. I could be wrong here but I just can’t find a “move” option. Surely a bummer since I’d have to re-upload the file if I wanted to move files around.

However, SkyDrive certainly appears to be a snappy service thus far and the UI is definitely a welcome sight for those used to other Windows Live services.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Windows Live SkyDrive, Online Storage

Think today was going to be a boring day? Think again! Microsoft has made an unsolicited cash and stock bid for Yahoo! totaling $44.6 billion dollars. This deal represents a premium of 62% from Yahoo’s Thursday closing price. Microsoft stated that Yahoo! shareholders could elect to receive either cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock. The offer consists of one half cash and one half Microsoft common stock.

If this deal goes through, it would definitely change the landscape of the Internet industry. For many years, we’ve been accustomed to the notion of the big three in Internet search - Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft with MSN. Over the last 3-4 years, Google has risen to the top primarily through the Internet ad industry thanks to paid search and their contextual ad service. In the meantime, Yahoo! (which ironically had the technology lead in paid search thanks to it’s purchase of Overture.com) and Microsoft both struggled to keep pace with Google.

In 2007, we saw additional consolidation in the Internet ad industry as several ad companies were snatched up by Google and Microsoft. While one could certainly see this as an opportunity for Microsoft to consolidate the Internet portal space, it really is more about the Internet ad space. Together, Yahoo! and Microsoft could easily create a force to be reckon with in the ad space - making life just a bit tougher for Google (which also disappointed analysts this past quarter).

It looks like 2008 will certainly be an interesting year in the Internet space.

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Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Microsoft,