Gmail Gets Pimped Out with Themes

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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?

Is It Right That Obama Is Using YouTube?

You heard that Obama was going to post fireside chats on YouTube, right? Well everyone did. (Except maybe for those people with wheels on their houses.)

When I first heard about that I was like “Yeah Obama’s a cool guy. He’s using the web and stuff.” But, then I questioned myself if he was doing the right thing when Allen Stern tweeted that he hated this whole thing.

First of all, it doesn’t look professional. Like c’mon, you’re the leader of a country and you’re going to use YouTube? A place filled with idiots, copyrighted videos, retarded video blogs and spam. He could instead post the videos on Change.gov or make a completely different site for this. Its not that hard to make a flash video player.

Second of all, isn’t this like taking YouTube to the next level? Aren’t they getting like an unfair advantage? Isn’t Obama killing all of YouTube’s competitors? Everyone (literally everyone) is going to use YouTube and no-one will give shit if there’s a better alternative out there. And think about all the new users/traffic YouTube is going to get.

So, what’s next? Bin Laden ranting on YouTube? International conferences being recorded live from webcams? Leaders of different nations pissing each other off by video blogging? Change…we got that. But, this? I’m not sure if this is a good kind of change.

Update: There’s a big discussion going on about this on Plurk. Some great points have been posted. Take a look.

Why Was MSN’s Homepage Down?

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?

Welcome to the Mainstream, Twitter.

I always wondered if Twitter would make it to the mainstream. I wasn’t sure if it would. Most people were too busy “poking” each other on Facebook or stalking lil’ kids on MySpace. But, it made it…and I’m a bit surprised to be honest.

Twitter just hit the one-billion tweets milestone today. Its not official or anything. The number of tweets were being counted by a 3rd party site called GigaTweet. Twitter might have hit this milestone long time ago since we don’t know when GigaTweet started counting. But, at least we know that we have more than a billion tweets.

You know Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Well anyone with a TV knows them. So, they were talking about Twitter on Indecision 2008. That probably got the whole “Twittosphere” twittering. Colbert and Stewart? They like took Twitter to the next level that day. Now the average Joe knows about Twitter and probably even started using it (or at least gave it a shot).

What really convinced me that Twitter got into the mainstream was when I was seeing this presentation by a few folks from a local tech company at my school. They were talking about Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live, etc. And then they mentioned something that really surprised. Guess what it was? Yeah, it was Twitter.

I was like “Woah! WTF! They know about Twitter? They don’t look like the type of people who would use Twitter. WOAH! Holy shit! That means little birdie made it to the mainstream.” I was really happy for Twitter actually. Its a great, unique idea and its pretty useful too. It deserves to be more popular than Facebook (not kidding).

Well Twitter just took its first step into the mainstream. I’m not sure if it will be as popular as Facebook. It might. It might not. Who knows. But, it sure is on the right path and its getting more popular everyday. Until then follow my tweets!

Hotmail Gets Screwed By the Redesign

Did anyone notice the Hotmail inbox redesign? I didn’t really see a buzz about this on the web. Gmail adds some stupid, ugly emotions and everyone starts talking about it. Some people probably even jacked off to it. Its just hilarious. Microsoft haters!

I’m not going to talk good about Hotmail anyway. First of all, I would like to say that Hotmail just totally fucked itself up with the new design. I wouldn’t call it ugly. I wouldn’t call it nice either. It just doesn’t look right. The old design was better in my opinion.

Well who cares about looks? Usability and functionality is more important, right? But guess what? I can’t fucking write emails on the “new” Hotmail. I just can’t type in the textbox. I’m using FF3 on Ubuntu. It works fine on IE6 though. Maybe its because of Ubuntu.

And why does it always ask me to upgrade my browser when I got to Hotmail? Did I mention that I’m using FF3? I think I did. And…most Hotmail users hate the new look.

Wow, I can’t believe this is happening. Microsoft can’t afford to screw up right now. They’re gonna lose a lot of their market share because this. I don’t even know what to say. I’m starting to get pissed at Microsoft. I don’t wanna use Gmail. Fuck!

Why do I get the feeling that this redesign thing was rushed out? Reminds me of Vista when it was first released for some reason. Microsoft, please take your time with IE8. Please.

Few questions for you

What do you think of Hotmail’s new look? Do you use Hotmail? Do you use Gmail (more)? Are you having the same problems as me on Hotmail? Do you think you’ll stop using Hotmail because of this? Anything else that you would like to add?