Good to see Yahoo make the obvious smart and easy play in response to Gmail ... I now have 100MB of storage in my free Yahoo account as well as a message size of 10MB or I will once they are done dicking with the new "smooth" inteface and come back online. 100MB is more than enough to meet my eamil needs for at least the immediate future ... now how about Yahoo bumping up the 25MB limit for my business mail account that comes with the web hosting service I buy from Yahoo and which is foolishly tied in some way I don't understand to my now supersized free Yahoo account.

Thank Google for Gmail ... you’ve made an important point about storage space ... it’s cheap so why not provide lots. And yes, tags or flags might be a better way to track emails than folders though as far as I can see threads are just an unnecessarily redundant variation on this same "where does this email belong" theme. Search might be useful ... but I’ve managed without it. And privacy is not really an issue ... where would anyone ever get the idea that email was private? I can tell you stories about folks retiring from Navy labs where their Outlook accounts were kept active for more than 6 months after they left without even the courtesy of an out-of-office message being put in place. How private does that sound? Hmmmm.

So does anyone really need a Gmail account? I’m thinking many people don't ... they are happily wedded to their current email names and email providers ... I've got Gmail accounts I can't even give away and those on Ebay are now selling for zip. Google may be missing the point ... it’s the integration of Yahoo mail with other Yahoo features such as calendar, alerts, and a My Yahoo which now includes RSS feeds in the news pages you can build that make the Yahoo package easily superior. But Yahoo is not perfect ... far from it ... they desperately need to do something about their Customer Service ... which was once at least sufficient but now seems to have degenerated into useless scrambled pseudo-random auto-responses.

If I were at Google I’d be focusing more on my search package. Though I have habitually used Google over Yahoo for search ... I have the Google script in my browser toolbar ... I'm suddenly finding Yahoo does a better job weighting a string of words without quotes than Google seems to be doing ... and Yahoo seems to be indexing my site changes faster. Sticking with Google ... for now.

And then there's Blogger ... very slick move by Google ... how did Yahoo miss this? Yikes ..enough whining about technology ... I need to get back out and run with the dogs through the flowers some more.