Following Pascal’s lead, and Matt’s comment, I just created an MSN passport of msn at simonhammond.com. I’ll be moving over to this from the old spankysimon at hotmail.com so update now if you are bothered about keeping in touch and are still hooked on MSN.
Why? Some people still mistake the hotmail account as a checked e-mail account rather than a redundant spam-trap. The new one closes this loophole and is just neater.
MSN: love it or hate it, it seems you have to tolerate it. At least for the time being. Likewise, Hotmail gains from the same migration bump. Still, there are a couple of things I'm playing with which you might want to try yourself as a kind of MS-nicorette patch.
Meebo is a web-based service that lets you log on to MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, AOL and GTalk. It's got strong encryption, history and can store your passwords.
GetMail runs on your computer and, as the name suggests, goes and gets your hotmail and forwards it to wherever you want. I haven't got it working but it looks pretty sweet and might finally get you onto a decent webmail with sweet integrated chat.
I got round to watching a presentation about the culture of Google last night. It was delivered at Stanford by Marissa Mayer and it was interesting all the way through, punchy (and a little geeky - that giggle!) but not slick.
A few things stuck for me.
Firstly, the use of ‘AB testing’ as a final arbiter in design decisions. Using real, live users to test alternatives for you seems very sensible, even if it does make me think of lab rats. I’d extend this as far as possible, even where there was not a design dilemma. Let the user shape your software by their behaviour!
Also, regarding early questions about monetizing Google, she invoked the principle of focussing on users since advertisers follow users and money follows the advertisers.
Finally, the strong points she made about 40 minutes in regarding social networking. The potential is huge but Orkut sucks and MySpace, despite its abominations, seems to have everyone awestruck.
