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.

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.

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.

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.