Yahoo Mail vs. Gmail

gmail vs yahoo mail

gmail vs yahoo mail

These are the 2 largest free email providers, and most people, have one of each. But which one is better overall? We’ll compare the details and give our honest opinion. Don’t worry we aren’t going to be spouting off a bunch of nonsense stats that do nothing more than make us sound smart, and confuse you.

A Few Similarities
Let’s look at some of the similar features, that make the 2 systems related. They both offer  inbox, drafts, sent, and all of this in a nice fast loading interface. They both now offer some sort of social chat or online friends report. I think yahoo has had this feature forever. Google picked it up at some point.

They both display advertisement, but this is expected. Something needs to cover the cost of the free email service. Managing servers, archiving data, managing spam filters, storing media, updates, and whatever else they might need in order to run a successful email hosting program.

They both do a decent job of taking care of spam. Just as good as any spam company like Barracuda.

I’m not going to talk about storage limits, I really don’t think this is a determining factor. No one runs out of space. If you want want to host large files there are more free file hosting services than you ever use. I think Yahoomail has unlimited and Gmail has 10GB or something. No one ever fills this stuff up.

A Few Differences
Gmail doesn’t seem to have a “trash can” or deleted items folder. If they do please tell me because there is all sorts of crap in there that I would like to retrieve.

Gmail does have an undo button. If you send an email you can “undo” or retract the message for something like 5 seconds. I’ve used this feature on more than one occasion.

Google Talk is an awesome new feature/concept. Google always has crazy stuff going on in their labs, but this is one of the tops.

YahooMail will ban any forwarding email address if you don’t watch out. It’s happened to be before. Say I have an email account at work mike@someworkplace.com and I want to forward that account to Yahoo so I check it while I’m on the road. If my mike@someworkplace.com account gets spam, forwards it to my yahoo account. I read it then mark it as spam. Yahoomail will blacklist the account mike@someworkplace.com that kinda sucks so watch out for that one.

Speed & Reliability
As far as reliability goes I would have to slightly give the advantage to Gmail. Sometimes Google crashes or hangs up, but this often due to local network connectivity issues and not gmail itself. Yahoo is fairly stable, but it does seem to crash more often.

I also get incompatibility messages when using different browsers and screen resolutions in yahoo mail. When this happens I’m prompted to use the old version of yahoo.

Gmail definitely presents a much faster and cleaner loading user interface. This may be because Google has way more data centers. I guess the data centers manage some of the gmail data. I’m not sure to tell you the truth.

Overall Winner
if i had to choose a overall winner I would have to go with Gmail at the momment. They seem to have the more stable platform with more features than Yahoo Mail.

What’s your oppinion? We’d love to hear it.

Web Analytics Upgrade

ipstat gets updates

ipstat gets updates

IPStat.com, a site that has offered free web site analytics since 1998, has recently upgraded their user reports page to include some pretty cool looking flash charting.

IPStat.com Web Analytics

This site has always been great for tracking data like “keywords”, “site referrals”, monthly views, bounce rate, page views, and unique views.  It’s recently modified flash graphing loads faster and is very pleasing to the eye. They should have done this sooner.

If you think Google already knows to much about you and your website, then maybe you want to try IPStat instead. It’s free, and just takes seconds to create and account, and get the code integrated.

At the very least you can use this project to monitor small to medium size sites. If you’re already a user (some 60,000 sites currently are), then you may want to login and check out the new updates if you’ve not done so already.

Sign Up Now

6 Best Url Shorteners

URL Shorteners make long URLs tiny, so they can fit into less space. Here are in our opinion 6 of the best URL shortening services online today. These are in no special order, and they are all 100% free.

tiny.cc

tiny.cc

tiny.cc

Tiny.cc site may be the original service, we are not sure. Site was first started back in 2006.

bit.ly

bit.ly

bit.ly

Bit.ly is twitter’s tiny url shortening service of choice. They may even own it, im not sure.

goo.gl

goo.gl

goo.gl

With a name like goo.gl this url shortening service has to belong to Google. The utility isn’t too fancy, but has a few features the others do not.

is.gd

is.gd

is.gd

is.gd claims to be the shortest of all of the url shortening services, as as far as I can tell they are right. A 4 character domain (including the extension)

ow.ly

ow.ly

ow.ly

Last but not least is the birdy shorty ow.ly. (just as short as is.gd mind you) This service actually allows you to share files as well! 🙂

URLInto.com

urlinto.com

urlinto.com


This service has a larger name than the others, but offers one thing none of them do. Revenue. This one shrinks your urls and allows you to create an adsese revenue page at the same time. This way you get paid to share.

Google #1 Result More Important than Ever

barking spiders

What is a barking spider?

Well becoming the #1 result in Google Search is more important than ever. Or at least more valuable than ever. As if people couldn’t tell what option is #1, Google has now added an arrow or triangle point out that item.

We were trying to look up barking spiders (because my wife had heard one when we were in the car the other day), and I found a new Google feature!

You can see in the image attached that the #1 item does indeed have a blue triangle next to it. This is the second large scale Google Search change in the last month or so, after the much talked about Google Suggest Everything on the fly.

Not sure what if anything it’s supposed to mean? I’m sure however that the #1 result with the triangle will get more clicks, or a larger click through rate than it did before.

Maybe this is an attempt by the search behemoth to increase the accuracy of it’s results. Maybe to many people were clicking #2, #3, #4, and so on. When what they really needed was on #1 just overlooked.

I’ve also noticed some advertisements getting the cool blue triangle as well. That seems a bit strange, but I really have no clue what the thing is for in the first place, so who am I to be  a judge of the situation.

Anyone have any input on this little change?

Google Killed Your Grandma

Google Killer

Killed by Google

Yep that’s right, Google has unofficially offed your Grandma. What? There was a study done a few years back to find the regions of the world that have the largest population of persons over 100. They then sent persons to those areas to log things like diet, living conditions, race, and social status.

The deciding factor ended up being social status. Old people were the center of the village or town. Night and day people would come visit them and ask them questions. These guys are the original Google. If you needed to know what to do then you asked the oldest person you could find. The older you were the more you’ve seen and the more you know.

So why did Google kill your Grandma? If she’s alive there may still be time to save her. Old people live only when they have a reason to live. If they are needed, they will find a way to stick around. So what happens if we don’t need them for anything? If we now find all our answers on Google or Yahoo, or Bing then what do we need there old shriveled up leather heads for? Not much.

So find a reason to love your Nana, Grandma, Grandpa, or Papaw. Pretend you love the smell of Moth Balls and Urine. (hey don’t get mad at me, you know it’s the truth) Ask them questions…then Google it later to find the real answer. I know it’s double data entry, but your Grandparents lives are at stake here people.

photo by kalidoskopika via flickr