As of today, I am now using the big three email betas: Gmail, Windows Live Mail Beta, and Yahoo! Mail Beta. I have entirely too many email accounts, but it’s interesting using the different clients. I’ve been using Gmail heavily for a couple months, I just switched to the Yahoo! mail beta last week, and to the Winodws Live Mail Beta today. I’ll spend some time analyzing the three over the next few weeks and see which one comes out on top. First impressions are that the Gmail is great, Yahoo! rocks, and Windows Live Mail needs some work.

The other night we had an eye emergency in the family, and I desperately needed the phone number for the Oregon Eye Specialists. As you probably know, I use FireFox. Well, guess what happens when you go to that site in FireFox? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Just a blank blue screen. No alternate content, just blank (Yes, Flash is installed). In my haste I went back to Google to track down the phone number. Later, I gave it a try in IE, and what do you know, it worked. Now if this isn’t the ultimate irony that an eye doctor has a completely flash-based movie (I won’t dignify it by calling it a site), that’s almost completely inaccessible by most definitions, I don’t know what is.

Let me start off by saying this Windows Live branding is dumb. I mean, I guess it presents some consistency. But, like with Windows Live Local, it sounds like a tag line for the evening news, not a web app.

So anyway, I was reading over at Dare’s blog about the release of Windows Live Favorites and the associated toolbar. I thought it might be interesting to try out. But, it’s entirely IE specific. Bleh. Considering this “Live” strategy is about hosted services, I see no reason, other than the fact that Microsoft makes IE, to not support other browsers. I only use IE when I have to to test sites, so this is certainly no reason to switch back. I’ll stick with del.icio.us and the firefox extension for now.

First Consummating, now del.icio.us. What a week for web startups. Though I have no experience with Consummating, I’m an avid del.icio.us user, and think it’s great that those guys made some cash for their work.

I just hope Yahoo doesn’t screw up any account mergers with del.icio.us like they did with Flickr. I still can’t get the my old Flickr account back (and the images in it) months after they forced the accounts to move over.

News yesterday about the Google Labs release of Google Transit (via SearchEngineWatch). It’s pretty cool that Portland is featured. Being that I live in the Portland area, it’s also pretty easy for me to test it out.

Overall, I was pretty impressed, I could see this being a very useful tool to figure out approximate routes. Considering that most public agencies probably don’t have top-notch web talent like Google does, this could be very helpful. The specifics were a bit disappointing though.

I’m seeing a delete option now in the actions menu in Gmail. Is this new? It always bugged me that the interface discouraged me from deleting anything. Interesting that they decided to go back to the model all other email clients use.

Email newsletters are still an important piece to Internet marketing as part of the “Permission Marketing” game. Along with blogs (and RSS feeds), they are a great way to update customers on the status of your site/product/service. What’s interesting is that for NetworthIQ we have almost 500 newsletter subscribers, but maybe only a couple dozen subscriptions to our feed. This highlights the importance of having another channel besides blogs to communicate with your customers.

I’ve pretty much wrapped up the move over to WordPress here from my old home. I think I’ll leave the Blogger posts over there for now, as WordPress’s blogger-import process is less than ideal. Isn’t there a Blogger API? Why do I need to publish all of the Blogger articles to my WordPress server and give up my blogpot address that gets some decent search engine traffic? Maybe there is a better import script out there? Of course that’s as much of a problem with Blogger’s either/or publishing process (once you switch to ftp publishing, you lose the address) as with the import script.