Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Rus — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:54:43 -0000

I can't agree with you enough.
*MY* email should be on *MY* system. I will never have it any other way.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:53:14 -0000

I sort of agree with Cody on this one.

"It gives me peace of mind to know I’m in control of my access to my email."

I honestly have no clue what you're talking about. Zero. As far as I know, if I fire up Outlook, I have to wait for my mail to be delivered to me. Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I think that means Outlook actually has to make a network connection to some box that has my mail on it. Who cares if that box is an exchange server or Google? You're still in the same amount of control.

Ok, so lets move away from the enterprise. What are my options now? Outlook magically giving me full control to my mail? Chances are my ISP is running an email server for me or I'm using a web-email with Outlook.

If you want to argue that you have more control to access to your email over a local network connection as opposed to the Internet fine. But that's a pretty lame argument if you ask me.

Also, Robert it's painfully obvious you don't play video games. In Starcraft & Warcraft we could create our own games inside it. And in case you missed it, some one ported the original doom into doom 3: http://battleteam.net/tech/...

And obviously Robert's never heard of the Quake console, which has been there since v1.0: http://console.planetquake....

Second Life is definitely interesting. But don't act as if the gaming world hasn't toyed with such ideas before it came along.

And most importantly, what's the coolest thing you wrote for second life (before you were banned)? Or were just praising it with minimal interaction?

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Karim — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:20:20 -0000

Hahahaha. I knew someone would mention Marissa Mayer. And who else but the chief evangelist and high priestess of Pine, Nancy McGough...

I loved how you blogged about it, with all those juicy screencaps from 24. No doubt the reason why the chick in the picture has such a look of anxiety on her face is that she can't figure out how to get Pine to filter all the spam she's getting. ;-)

But maybe she doesn't share your philosophy on spam, which is apparently to NOT filter spam, don't fight spam, just let it happen.

The Marissa Mayer quotes are great too. She said she gets as many as 700 to 800 emails a day, so she needs something "fast." (She didn't say how many of the 800 emails were spam.)

Of course even with the blazing speed of Pine, she still can't keep on top of her 800 emails a day, so what does she do? Quote: "I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight."

I suppose it's a great email client if you're like Marissa and you love killing 14 hours on a Saturday plowing through Viagra ads.

Call me when they figure out that Ctrl-C means Copy and Ctrl-V means Paste....

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Rhandir — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:53:47 -0000

If all these email clients and servers supported a standard access protocol, e.g. IMAP, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation. IMHO, the #1 thing people can do to move email, and Internet messaging in general, forward is to just say no to clients and servers that don’t support open standard protocols.
Amen!

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

ℵm — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:39:14 -0000

There's a lot of FUD in this thread and, if forced to, I could write a long article refuting all the cluelessness, but for now I'll refute two things:

1. Pine does support tagging and has since version 4.60, which was released more than 2 years ago (2004 May 10). AFAIK, Pine is the only IMAP client that supports unlimited user-defined tags (aka labels or keywords).

2. Someone in the corporate world *does* use Pine, namely Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience at Google. I blogged about this here:
http://deflexion.com/2006/0...

If all these email clients and servers supported a standard access protocol, e.g. IMAP, we wouldn't need to have this conversation. IMHO, the #1 thing people can do to move email, and Internet messaging in general, forward is to just say no to clients and servers that don't support open standard protocols.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Cody — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:22:15 -0000

It's $400 dolllars for the Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition.

OpenOffice, AbiWord, Pine, Thunderbird, etc...FREE

That's $400 I don't have to spend. So that's one big reason why I hate Outlook, because of that fact.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

ffg — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:14:27 -0000

Oops -- sorry about the double post...

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

ffg — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:13:57 -0000

“Tell us some feature that Pine or Thunderbird has that Outlook misses.”

Storing email as searchable, accessible, archivable text, accessible on every platform.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

ffg — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:00:54 -0000

“Tell us some feature that Pine or Thunderbird has that Outlook misses.”

How about natively storing their mail in an accessible, nonproprietary format that literally thousands of tools on every platform can easily read from, write to, search, and archive?

Ever had a PST file take a crap on you? It's not a place you want to be.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Mihir Gandhi — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:38:03 -0000

Outlook is not free, but I pay anyway for the MS Office suite (yes, I know as soon as I type this someone is going to talk about OpenOffice and how its better than MS Office, etc; but my company policies do not allow me to use that on any business machines), so I am really paying nothing extra. I will give thunderbird a try on my personal machine, from the screenshots and features described it looks good.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Mihir Gandhi — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:34:22 -0000

Also, I like lotus notes, but the company I work for uses Exchange server, which is working well for me as well.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Mihir Gandhi — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:33:32 -0000

Outlook is now more than an email client. What has RSS to do with email??? I like how RSS feeds integrate so well with Outlook 2007. Why have different clients for everything when you can roll your email, RSS, calender, everything in one!

Text emails? I honestly think it has been AGES since I have received a text-only email. Most of my emails are HTML or Richtext!

Yes Outlook runs on windows only - that is a valid argument. I still do not think pine is the best - thunderbird is alright - I would give it a try if I were moving to a non-windows environment.

Gmail and live-mail are great, but I still do not like web-based email. I prefer to get them on Outlook (or another good email client capable of reading html and richtext emails), preferably using IMAP or Exchange protocol. The AJAX interface may be good, but I prefer my thick client to the AJAXed thin-client.

The other good thing I like about Outlook is the spam filters - they are updated almost every month, and they really catch 90% of my spam, of not more.

That said, there is one thing I *really* want to see in Outlook - ability to send personalized emails (without using the crappy mail-merge feature in MSWord).

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Steve Wilhelm — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 06:38:44 -0000

Things I like about GMail:

1. Instant access to all my mail on the three machines I use almost every day: two Macs and one Windows XP PC.

2. Wicked fast search of the nine thousand email messages I have received and sent over the last two years. For example, GMail found my 190 email messages that include the word "Robert" in less than three seconds. The oldest received in 7/04, the newest received yesterday.

3. Very reliable, seamless spam filtering.

4. Automatic harvesting of every email address I ever received or sent mail to into my contact list, currently over 550 contacts.

5. Conversations. This was the hardest feature to get used to but now I find it difficult to follow email threads in Yahoo! or Hotmail without this UI feature.

6. Ability group emails using tags or Labels. Emails can be associated with more than one label.

7. Really nice Ajax-based spell checker.

8. Awesome email access on my Nokia 6625 mobile phone.

9. Automatic parsing of email for events to be included in the integrated Calendar.

10. Automatic SMS alerts for calendar reminders.

11. Optional forwarding to another account. I do this to my free Yahoo! account for redundency.

12. Over 2.7GB of available storage and growing every day

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Cody — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:56:30 -0000

Pine deals with email. I'm not sure what kind of email YOU send.

What, is Plain Text too hard for you to grasp? ;)

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

LayZ — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:11:01 -0000

"Tell us some feature that Pine or Thunderbird has that Outlook misses."

Er... able run on something other than Windows? That's the first thing that comes to mind.

Uh... Thunderbird is free?

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Rhandir — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:22:56 -0000

Pine is fantastic for reading email. Lack of calendaring, RSS feeds, tagging - that's a feature, not a bug. Seriously. You have to use the right tool for the job. If I want to deal purely with written expression in an email, pine is great.

That said, I tend to use webmail, and view offline mail readers as archiving tools. (As mbox readers, basically.)

I have yet to find an RSS reader that I enjoy using enough to be bothered to tweak. An integrated one shows some promise as a concept, but I'd rather be able to pick which RSS display engine is used by Outlook than be tied to only one.

Oh, and calendaring? Not helpful if my coorespondents cannot read/write to my calendar database. The universality of email is what is wanted - not vendor lock in. [apple, I'm looking at you] I haven't found one yet that is good enough at approximating solutions (to known hard problems) of complex scheduling conflicts. I'd even settle for one that could correctly manage appointments/events across time zones. Does Office 2007 do these things?

-r.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Cody — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:59:16 -0000

First, I can read RSS feeds via the command line if I wanted to. Second, WTF does an RSS feed have to do with email? Nothing. NEXT.

Robert talks about wikis...can't install one himself.
I don't talk about wikis often...but I can install one.

There was nothing about programming your own wiki. A true computer geek can install a wiki, no big deal. I was proving my point, to which I succeeded.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Mihir Gandhi — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:03:36 -0000

Cody seems like he is our of his mind!

You implied that if you use Outlook you are out of your mind, but did not give any evidence to support it. Tell us some feature that Pine or Thunderbird has that Outlook misses. Btw, can your Pine read RSS feeds? Outlook 2007 can do so!

Second, you said that Robert talks the talk, but you walk the walk. Using MediaWiki is not walking the walk IMHO. If you wrote your own wiki software, your own OS, your own email client, your own word processor, your own browser... now THAT would be walking the walk! If you use a software that someone else wrote, where is "walking the walk" in that?

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

LayZ — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:53:46 -0000

Brent, you still didnt' answer my question. You told me what Exchange give me. I acknowledged that it is a great free/busy server. What I want to know is what SPECIFIC advantages I get by having Outlook connecting to Exchange. A plethora of mail server options provide web access and global address lists. I've not seen anything in your list that is all that innovative or unique. I love the: "don't know how to manage Exchange" defense every time its stability issues are brought up.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Deepak — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:36:16 -0000

That said, one can't deny that the web is definitely front and center of most applications. Yes games are not going to be played on the web per se, but without the web there would be no Everquest or World of Warcraft. S

I definitely think that the integration between online and offline tools needs to improve. Alternately, we need to be in a situation where we are always online, but that isn't happening anytime soon. Personally, since I am almost always online, I am fine with gmail, since its ideal for my workflow, but your point on being able to access email offline is very valid. In theory though, shouldn't the blackberries and treos of the world take care of being ona plane and needing to catch up on email?

To those who hate Outlook/Exchange, I hope you never have to use Lotus Notes/Domino. Enough to test the most magnanimous amongst us.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Gert van Gool — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:04:14 -0000

@ Carolus Holman: There exists a plugin for Outlook to load up "remote calendars" (http://remotecalendars.sour...
I've used it a few times, but I found it not very useful for Outlook.

Like some-one said before, Outlook 2007 can use it by default. However, mine seemed to "forget" its calendars.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Thomas Wenzl — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 05:04:05 -0000

Cody, I don't know what you are using e-mail for. Granted, e-mail isn't the right file transfer tool and maybe not the best tool for long discussions, but for every other purpose - why not? Ask questions, request stuff, getting hotel/flight/whatever confirmations, delegate tasks, etc. I know a lot of UNIX guys you force themselves to use Pine or similar command-line based tools, just because they think it's cooler and that all the "mouse" tools are just crap. But if you're using e-mail to do your everyday business, not just to delete NDRs ;-), than you need a good e-mail application, that helps you creating rules, tracking and categorizing your e-mails, etc. This tool can be Outlook, but could also be Entourage, Evolution, whatever. But I really think you won't be as productive with Pine. Some years ago, when I needed to use Pine, it was good for send/reply/forward, but managing a lot of folders, storing e-mail for later reference, tracking e-mails, etc. was just really bad and not very productive with Pine.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Guest — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 04:53:14 -0000

LazyZ: Sounds like you've worked for companies with people who don't know how to manage Exchange. I've lived with and without Exchange and in a corporate environment, I'll take with everytime. Exchange gives me Outlook web access, global address book and free/busy scheduling to name a few. Maybe not a big deal for personal email. Outlook 2007 has some pretty nice features as well.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Baba — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 02:46:28 -0000

Some of the influential people in the tech industry have spent nearly $20 million on that Second Life gimick.. That may not mean anything, but it's a good sign to me that It may be more than a gimick.

Re: Why Ozzie doesn’t think the Web is the be all and end all

Karim — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:45:51 -0000

gmail is safe. 2GB of permanent email. In contrast to hotmail users, I have never heard of anyone losing email to gmail.

Windows Live Mail (which replaces Hotmail) help says:

"Free Windows Live Mail accounts become inactive if you don't sign in for 120 days, or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account. Once an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted, but the account name is still reserved. If the account stays inactive for a further 90 days, the account name is permanently deleted."

Gmail Program Policies says:

"Google will terminate your account in accordance with Section 9 of the Terms of Use if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months."

Nooo. Noooooo. Not Section 9!!!

Yes, Gmail accounts can be inactive for about five months longer than Windows Live Mail. Which would come in handy if, you know, you get sent to prison for smoking Google Crack (Beta) and can't check your mail.

Is 120 days the same as 30 days? No.

Is nine months the same as permanently? No. Not unless you're pregnant, in which case it probably only feels that way.