Your Inbox in Web 2.0

For some weeks now, Yahoo! Mail Beta has been availed for the public to try out. Here’s my take on it.

First, it’s important to note that Microsoft’s Live, along with several other, smaller email “servers,” have already been out of the bag for several months. But there’s no rush. Right? Well, with what Yahoo! is currently offering in the way of an upgrade to its web-based mail client, it seems that the Sunnyvale native did in fact hasten the release of Mail Beta. What does it have to show for the rush?

For one, it’s slow. Very. As someone who has tried a great many browser-operated email applications and services, this becomes evident from sign-in onward. It’s genuinely hard to cope with. After several minutes of navigating my folders and the options menu I had enough. I went back to the old system - which operates rather well, by the way. It’s no Gmail, but for the average user, it’s web-based email that works.

Visually, Mail Beta is pleasing, and the new arrangement is as “today” as today can get. There’s a healthy integration of the latest technologies, for sure. It’s for people who want the look and feel of an Outlook-type without…Outlook. It’s not for the impatient, however. Kudos to Yahoo! on the eye candy, but so far its been more sour than sweet.

On to another revision elsewhere on the web, one that hasn’t been let out of the bag just yet. Apple’s .Mac Mail.

Disclaimer: I’m quite the Mac fan.

Since it hasn’t seen the light of day, so to speak, I can’t hark on how genius Apple’s latest “great novelty” service is. Nor can I make repeated inquiries as to why no one else came out with such an improvement first. But I’ll say this: If .Mac Mail is anything similar to Apple’s desktop app, Mail, it’s bound to be a hit - albeit for roughly 5% of the personally computing market.

Preview images/screenshots show it to be spot-on to its ancestral influence, and it’s bound to be packed with all the latest goodies and gadgetry that scream Web 2.0. And with full integration with one’s OS X applications as well as what promises to be a quickly growing (think: Widgets) library of plugins and add-ons, many may just plop down the annual fee for .Mac to live vicariously through Apple’s own stockpiled server farms.

Hey, it could very well be true, what Steve Jobs mentioned recently. 2007 might end up one of the best years in Apple’s history. Just don’t be surprised if you call yourself a ‘convert’ 12 months from now.