The Hypocrisy Weblog

cnet’s web 2.0 blog, “Webware” has announced it’s Webware 100 winners-list. The question is now; how is this list relevant to anyone in the Internet-business? Each and every category, 10 of them, has 10 winners each – and each and every site on the top 100-list anyone who’s involved in working with the Internet (in any way) have heard of.

The categories are; Browsing, Communications, Community, Data, Entertainment, Media, Mobile, Productivity and Commerce, Publishing, Reference.

Surely, it is a good ego boost for the people behind the services to get recognition, but does it serve any journalistic purpose? I am not so sure about that; Rafe Needleman and the Webware crew are preaching for the already saved. There is no internal ranking of the sites in the individual categories – so how do I as a visitor know which site got more votes than the other? (Yes, alright – they do have a list of the over-all top 10 and the sites that got over 1000 votes, though it doesn’t show the internal ranking in between the sites within each category. Perhaps the over-all statistic material wasn’t enough?! I don’t know…)

From my own perspective I am glad that the swizz army-knife-like site Netvibes, which deserves more media coverage – as it is a really nice service to keep track on all your communication needs ranging from rss-feeds (sites, forums, email, blogs etc), to email, to skype, to.. yeah – you get the idea.

Google was the company with most services in the top 100-list, yet this is not surprising as they are the biggest site on the Internet.

To the Webware authors; Please make the list more detailed the next time and get a broader statistic foundation (aka get more people to vote on the list), then we’re talking about a relevant list.

The “f” in http://us.f348.mail.yahoo.com stands for “farm”, as in which server-farm your mail-account with Yahoo! Mail is based on.

The staff behind Yahoo! Mail made a post on their blog, which they gave the entertaining name “We’ve parked your Mail account next to the tractor“.

An interesting thing that the staff write in this blog-post is:

“But we regularly move accounts from farm to farm to balance the load on our servers. So there’s no guarantee your account will be on any specific farm for any amount of time.”

I know Yahoo! has immense traffic and a gigantic datastorage over at their end, but why not do what Google has done and only point to “mail.google.com”, or in Yahoo!’s case: “mail.yahoo.com”?! This would make such questions never pop up in their customers, aka their users’ minds.

Speaking about Yahoo! Mail; The beta of their webmail-service is a nice, yet a bit heavy on the local computer, but it does have more features making it closer to a “real” email-client than what their biggest competitor Google Mail.

Though, one of the major downsides of Yahoo! Mail is their advertisements. It takes up way too much of the usable space. I can’t wait, or at least I hope this day comes, when Yahoo! ditches their banner advertisements in their webmail-service and implements context-based text-ads.