Got Wills

Web Worker Daily posted a nice rebuttal to PC Magazine’s article which stated that Gmail is falling behind the other major Web email clients (mostly because of it’s lack of drag and drop sorting). I find it takes far less time to archive after you read (or don’t read) a message than it does to try to decide which folder it should go in. The labels (aka tags) can provide you with any sorting that a folder could do and more. I can put more than one label on a message, but can only store it in a single folder with the other services.

On another note, Gmail provides free pop / smtp access (MSN will allow access through Outlook or Outlook Express) so if I wanted my email access to feel more like a desktop app, I would simply set it as such. I also find the little signature ads to be extremely annoying, not to mention the ad banners on the actual client page. I have simply stopped clicking on banner ads. If I find something in a banner ad interesting, I’ll Google it and access the page through a resulting text ad or the search results. I’ve decided that I, for one, am going to stop supporting and encouraging the annoying, real estate hogging, banner ads that litter, not only MySpace page, but also Yahoo! mail and MSN LiveMail.

After reading Om Malik’s and Michael Arrington’s posts about GOOG411, I decided to give it a try. The voice was a little hard to understand at times, but it worked rather well, listing the pizza joints around my place ordered by distance, however, it still had a listing for a pizza place that hasn’t been around for a year or two… funny thing is, it listed the restaurant that took it over right after the old listing.

Anyway, the service is very easy to use and will even connect your call for free. You can also have google send you a text message with the listings if you prefer. Pretty nice, especially when Verizon Wireless charges $1.50 for the call.

They have a nice cheat sheet with all the neat stuff you can do, including saying or keying your zip code instead of city, state. Now if they get residential listings on the service… I’ll be changing my phone book listing from 800-FREE-411 to 800-GOOG-411.

It sure is, even if it is a small kingdom… I’m not talking about my house, I don’t claim to be able to manage that. No, I am talking about my Web space. I love having control of phillipwills.com… including a blog (this), a web site, and a web site in development (it’s not much yet, but like I said, it’s in development.

I’ve just had a new idea for a web service today. I’ll not give any clues today about what it will be, but I’ll be registering the domain name in the next week or so, but I’m pretty excited about this. It could be a great service… if other people decide they need it, which they may not. Anyway, more details to come.