Why does Google have to build things to a certain degree of ugliness? They always do that. They’re just creatively challenged, I guess.

Back in mid November I was getting all happy and stuff for Google because I thought they hired a few designers. I’m talking about the release of Gmail themes. Well what the fuck happened? They just ruined YouTube with a make over.

Redesigns are supposed to make things look better. But, damn! YouTube looks like it was designed by a complete noob. Did you look at the navbar? That’s just fubar. Shit couldn’t get more hilarious. Microsoft fucks up Hotmail and now YouTube gets screwed by Google. Nice.

I don’t see what the point of the redesign was? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t even notice any major changes. The header got shorter, the logo got smaller and the navbar got raped. That’s about it.

Sometimes I feel like I could do a better job than these designers who make the big bucks for making this fugly. Well enjoy the new YouTube.

Lets rant! Hate the redesign? I know you do. Tell me about it. Swear the fuck out. I won’t mind.

Breaking news! (And woohoo! I’m the first one to blog about this. I feel special!)

YouTube is playing with their video player. Take a look at my screenshot on the left. Notice anything different?

They’re making the player wider and everything below it. They’ve narrowed down the stuff on the right (related videos, info, more from, etc).

Well these are good changes, my friend. I like it! Wider screen is always better. But, are these changes temporary? Like are they just playing around or will these changes stay for good?

Anyways, I’m off. I’ll get my people looking into this tomorrow. And until then I wanna hear what YOU think about this. Good? Bad? Excited?

Yeah that’s right, Hotmail fixed the bugs. When? Not sure, but I noticed it yesterday.

Do you even know what bugs I’m talking about? Well there were two bugs that I found. One of them didn’t let me type in the textbox and the other one kept telling me to upgrade my browser even though I was on FF3.

So, as you’ve guessed I can now write emails and I don’t get that annoying upgrade notice anymore. But, there’s still one thing that really bugs the shit outta me. Its that huge banner at the top. I just fucking hate that!

Why would you put a giant ad banner all the way up there? It just screws up the inbox. It brings everything down. It doesn’t look proportional. If Microsoft really wanted to stick in some ads then why don’t they put it somewhere on the sidebar?

I don’t really care where they put it, but they should just take it off the top. One more thing, do they target an audience for the ads or what? Do I look like I’m interested in Disney shit? I’ve seen a lot of different ads on Hotmail and none of them seem to interest me.

And can they not add a few icons or something? It looks like someone’s grandma designed it. Like the design is alright, but seriously are they trying to copy Gmail? I think they are. They took off all the icons after the redesign. Wow. Hotmail, you faggot!

And please get a logo, Hotmail. Please. I can’t take this level of ugliness. Hey, would you get a logo if I said Gmail has a logo? Yeah that’s right Gmail has a logo. You better go get one for yourself, Hotmail.

Oh guess what? The folks at Gmail have actually done something useful rather than building some random (retarded) features such as the mail goggles. So, they’re rolling out themes on Gmail. Sweet, huh?

I’m pretty impressed actually. They’ve made 30 themes and some of them are just amazing. My fav one has to be the one called Ninja. Well you’ll get to see all of the themes as the slowly become available to us. When? They’re saying within a few days. I guess they’re just waiting till it gets all hyped up and everything. Good strategy.

Now I was also wondering if they did this to bitch slap Hotmail. I would say yes. Hotmail got a redesign and it was just fubar. And look at Gmail. Damn! This is something I like about Google. When they do something, they do it right (or at least take things seriously). Microsoft, dude what happened? You’re nothing but a failure right now.

I’ll probably start using Gmail more. But, their privacy policy freaks me out. I’ll have to do my research and see if they’ve made any changes to their policies. I hope they did.

Update (40 mins later): Holy shit! They just rolled out the themes to all of us. That was fast. Well go play them.

Update #2 (2 hours later): Okay not all of us can see the themes yet. So, don’t freak out if you can’t see the “Themes” tab under “Settings”.

Excited? Can’t wait to use them?

What do you think of the whole theme idea? Any fav themes? And do you think they rolled this out to show the finger to Hotmail? Oh and anyone switching over to Gmail? Or going to use Gmail bit more than usual because of the hot new looks?

I wake up at around 10:47, I turn on my laptop, I open Firefox and the first thing I notice is that MSN’s homepage is gone. I was like WTF? Well it went back to normal after a few minutes though.

What happened? I don’t know. I sent an email to MSN. Let’s see what they say. But, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna feed us some technical difficulty bullshit. I wonder what really happened.

Oh and you guys wanna see a screenshot? “Picture or didn’t happen.” Well good thing I took one. Here it is:

MSN was apparently like this for about 2 hours. Thanks for this info, @kellyvbrown.

Over to you

I wanna hear what YOU think happened? Someone screwing with MSN? Or just a simple technical difficulty? Any crazy theories out there? And participate on my poll, okay?