Connecting the dots ...
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.
This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.
Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?
Forbidden
Error 403
Ouch … this is not what you want to see in your Gmail Contacts. Weird… and not fun, not even on Sunday.
It’s not system-wide, appears to be specific to one of my accounts – crazy log-in-log out sequence produces occasional access, but mostly the error. 
Update: apparently (thanks, Charlie), this is a more wide-spread problem than I had thought…
I couldn’t care less when Gmail added those cute smiley, but the newly released themes go beyond cosmetics, they can actually increase your productivity. How? By helping you differentiate between multiple Gmail accounts.
I have branded (Google Apps, using my own domain) accounts for business and personal use, and a few generic @gmail.com types for subscriptions, lists, online purchases. It’s all neatly tied together by Gmail Manager, the excellent Firefox extension. Even then I sometimes find myself typing an email in the wrong account window. Here’s the solution: give all your Gmail accounts its own distinctive theme.
I don’t really care for the fancy themes, but at least the top row are all subtle, minimalist styles. Pick one for each of your accounts, you’ll get used to the colors fast and never mix up your accounts again.
Well.. almost. As usual, Google rolled out this new feature to the generic, @gmail.com accounts only. Google Apps users will have to wait – lets’ hope not too long.
How old is your work computer? – asks the Wall Street Journal.
Mine is a year-and-a half old. The dual-core former screamer (obviously not the one the the pic to the right) has become an average slow machine now that quad-core is the standard, but I could not care less. I don’t need a faster, bigger computer for work, in fact not even for video-conferencing or watching movies.
In fact I (and most of us) don’t even need 1-2 year-old computers, either, now that browser is the computer.
Now, you’ve heard this a zillion times, but let me present another side: the more you use your computers, the slower they get. In fact it gets worse: you don’t even have to use your computers, they get slower by themselves.
Why, and more importantly, what’s the solution? Read the full article on CloudAve – while at it, might as well grab the feed here. 
Loren Baker, Editor of Search Engine Journal discusses his experience of getting his Google account frozen without a warning. Nothing new, we see these cases every few months. If you’re a well-know blogger like Loren, getting resolution might take 15 hours – I don’t even want to think how long it would take for less prominent users get their account issues fixed.
There are a few things we can all learn from Loren’s case:
I’m discussing these and other steps to avoid disruption on CloudAve. (To stay up-to-date on SaaS, Cloud Computing and Business, grab the CloudAve Feed here).
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Yes, you read it right: the first announcement of Zoho Mail’s general availability, with Google Gears-based offline support did not come from Zoho, but from the Google Gears team, which released this video discussing Zoho’a use of Google Gears, synchronization, the Marketplace and a lot more a bit prematurely:
Somewhat used to it (see TechCrunch Releases New Zoho Service: Invoice) the Zoho folks decided to play along and released their own announcement.
This announcement somewhat symbolizes the interesting dynamics between Zoho and Google: competitors, yet collaborators. ReadWriteWeb is probably right:
But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology – such as Google Gears.
First of all what’s in today’s announcement:
So with all that, why am I unhappy? I’m a die-hard Gmail fan, mostly for its productivity boosting features:
Zoho Mail handles the latter two well, but I am not too happy with the way conversation threading works. My business conversations last weeks, include dozens of emails, and on a traditional mail system the threads are basically a pain to put together before responding to someone. Gmail handles it automagically, and as a side-effect, it presents a lot more information on it’s list screen – since the dozen individual emails are now compressed into one line.
But we all have different usage patterns. When debating the importance of threads, I looked at other Zoho Mail users whose conversations are typically one-off, so they won’t value threading feature at all. In fact not everyone needs productivity. Not everyone wants to go through a paradigm change.
AOL, YAHOO, Hotmail are the absolute web-mail market leaders,and they should do whatever it takes to keep their customers. Their mainstream users are corporate employees who use Outlook in the Office, whether they like it or not is irrelevant, they are used to it. When they go home, they may not email a lot. Some will check their emails daily, once a week, or less. They want a personal email that resembles to what they already know. For them familiarity is more important than productivity.
As much as I hate to admit it, I am NOT the mainstream Zoho customer. I am probably more a part of the TechCrunch 53,651 (even though it’s 1M now) than the mainstream customer base Zoho targets. And if it wasn’t clear before, the current crisis brought home the message loud and clear: only businesses with real revenues survive. Which probably means that for all my yelling and screaming, Zoho is quite right coming out with an email system that meets the needs of businesses who actually pay for it. After all, this is what enables them to offer all the other apps I like for free. And I like free. 
(Disclosure: I’ve been a long-time Advisor to Zoho and they are exclusive sponsor of my main gig, CloudAve. This article has been cross-posted there.)
Here’s a classic example for stupid “contextual” in-line ads:
Clicking on the “feature” link in this article brings up skin care products. The “tool” link in the first line points to Honeymoon Planning Services. Here are some more cases of “contextual” advertising gone bad:
But all these mishaps aside, here’s another reason why you should avoid such in-line hypertext ads:
They seriously reduce readability. This article happens to be quite important, so the first thing I’d like to do is click on the link to the Google tool that allows me to protect my account (you should read the original article to understand what’s at stake). But I can’t – the link is hijacked. In fact I can’t even tell if there is any intentional, relevant link in this post. Blogs, wikis, you-name-it: online writing is all about linking and relevancy. But there’s only so many we can deal with: when your article becomes a link-jungle, it becomes impossible to find the meaningful ones, supporting your message.
See also: Ridiculous Advertising – or the Case of the Hijacked link
Bernard’s title @ ReadWriteWeb, Breaking Free of Outlook perfectly matches my own sentiment: in fact I called the MS Client Outlook-prison repeatedly.
Unlike Bernard, I escaped from prison in stages:
I’ve never looked back, and am definitely more productive than in my desktop-bound life. I could see first-hand a lot of people move in the same direction: my How to Import All Your Archive Email Into Gmail guide become an all-time classic, probably approaching 100,000 hits by now. Gmail’s IMAP support changed everything, so I issued a Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail. A while later Google woke up, and started to offer a migration tool to subscribers of the paid Google Apps version. (Oh, and they are being sued by LimitNone, who claims Google basically stole their gMove product).
But the love-affair with Gmail was not without trouble: I first documented some glitches last spring: Gmail, I Love You – Don’t Let Me Down, then real trouble started a month ort so ago.
Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately. The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.
I somewhat jokingly called “retry now” Gmail’s Penalty Button, when I noticed every time I hit it the wait counter increased by a minute.
Now I have an update: you don’t need the penalty button, the counter increases by itself. Every time, “reliably”. Basically as soon as you see the Oops error, you might as well close the browser tab (or browser itself), as it won’t recover on its own. This annoying error has become the most frequent “feature” of Gmail, to the extent that it really undermines productivity.
I hope Google will fix it. They MUST. It’s the crown jewel of Google Apps. In fact without Gmail and Calendar there wouldn’t be Google Apps at all.
Update: Oops: apparently there’s a real service by the name of Oopsmail. Obviously I am not referrring to them in the title. (Although… ? 🙂 )
Gears-enabling Gmail will be great, for those “unconnected” moments (hours), and I certainly hope they will avoid dumb mistakes that made Google Reader almost useless offline.
But for now, all I wish is a little more reliabilty. Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately. The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.
A minute and half is not that much – except that it’s not only waiting for the requested operation, it freezes up Gmail entirely. So if you’re impatient, you’ll inevitable click the “Retry now” button. After all, that’s whay it’s there, isn’t it?
Wrong! You’ve just found Gmail’s penalty button! Every time you click it, the wait counter increases by a minute.
Still want to work, rather than go for coffee? The only solution is to completely close the browser tab – sometimes the entire browser – then log back into Gmail again.
Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster
– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:
One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.
Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?
Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).
Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.
Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar. 
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