The Pandemic Soul

Here’s my problem: I feel like I have these two friends who are acquaintances, but really don’t want to have anything to do with each other. Both of them have really cool toys and a bunch of money. If we put their toys together, we could make, like, the the Optimus Prime of all toys. The biggest, the best, the coolest. But instead, they continue to be mutually ambivalent about each other.

Take, for example, Yahoo! Mail and GMail. (PS, I have Y! Mail +) Y! Mail is okay. The spam filter could still use some work (why is it that when I target something as spam, the filter doesn’t “learn” like it’s supposed to?), and I need more than one signature. I certainly need more than one persona. More than anything, though, I need sub-folders. I get dozens of e-mails a day (usually about 60, not counting SPAM), and I keep everything. This is where GMail shines — it allows me to keep everything, tag it, archive it, etc. Overall, the feature I’m lacking from both is the ability to upload all of my e-mail into the archive. Verdict: Y! Mail and GMail are still for teeny-boppers and the obsessively web-centric. But it’ll never become the choice of rest of the world until it becomes everything that Outlook is, and more.

Or howabout Flickr and Picasa? (PS, I have Flickr +) Yes, I realize that one is web-based and the other is not. But why do I have to choose? I put everything on Flickr with my tags, etc., blah. But why can’t I have Picasa’s ease-of-use for editing photos in Flickr? I want a more fluid photo experience. I want to put photos on my computer, have my client-side program to allow me to tag them, put them in sets, crop, edit, (etc.), and then I want it to give me the simple option of making these photos available online. I don’t want to have to organize everything in Flickr and then organize everything on my computer — or vice-versa.

Let’s talk search, too. I use Yahoo! Search for two reasons: the first being that I love Yahoo!’s newsbits. They keep me informed of everything I want, and need to know. Second, I like Yahoo!’s home page. Somewhere I read someone compare Yahoo! to what AOL should have been. Very true. But their search is only so-so. Google’s search is spot-on, and simple. Furthermore, Google has the amazing Google Desktop which makes it a snap to find my shit online, too. Yahoo’s toolbar looks like crap and is generally just annoying. Why can’t I have Google Search transplanted into Yahoo!’s site?

Now Google has Google Talk. Yahoo! has YIM. (PS, I use Trillian Pro 3.1) It’s too early to find out just how useful GT is going to be, but I’m sure it’ll be big with the techy-types. Nonetheless, it’s just another foot in the distance between the two, and I’m sure I’ll be wishing that there was some mutually common ground that all these cool toys could be used with.