I had never seen it anywhere until today… I am talking about Bing as the #1 source of traffic to my blog with a whopping 30% of the traffic vs. a little over 20% now coming from Google Searrch!
See the screenshot showing all traffic sources since May 1:
Apparently, I am not alone and Bing may be a better search engine after all.
Are you seeing anything like this?
Have you ever wanted (or needed) to close your Hotmail account? I forecast long hours of banging your head against the keyboard, trying to figure out WHY you can’t do it.
Me? I am trying to figure a way to do it… When I click on Options > More Options > # View and edit your personal information > Close Account, I get prompted for my password to verify my identity. I enter it and I am prompted with this message:
As for this message:
* “One or more paid services or a Microsoft Points account is linked to your account.” – I have no paid services with Microsoft or a Microsoft Points account: believe me, I checked, even… to make sure, just in case I forgot! I followed every option described in the help for this issue.
* When I click on the “Close your Microsoft account” link at the bottom of the page, I am taking to THIS other page:
(which basically states the same thing… and when I click on to go to the Microsoft Account and Billing Services site, I confirm that… I have no services associated with my account.
SOOOOO, I am basically stuck in a loop. I just wrote to Hotmail support, with the hope that they may help explain what is going on. Any ideas?
I just noticed this notice on our Basecamp:
They are phasing out their support of Internet Explorer 6. I am glad this is starting to happen, since having to support older browsers holds back new web development.
Obviously they can afford to be a leader in this kind of thing because:
1) 37Signals, the developers of Basecamp, are known for going about product development their own way… and they are very seldom wrong.
2) Most of their user base will probably not really care about this move, since it’s likely made up of software folks who are no longer using IE 6 any more.
BTW, any other folks who downloaded and installed Firefox 3 recently reading this? How do you like it?
Today is the day this deal gets decided on. I just finished reading an excellent analysis by Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, who looks at the deal and why the alternative at this point (a search-based deal with Google) cannot succeed… therefore leaving Yahoo! with no other option but to take up Microsoft on its bid.
I woke up to the news of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo! I was immediately propelled out of bed!
As much mixed feelings as such a move gives me, it makes business sense for Yahoo! to accept it -they seem to be in pretty bad spot in more ways than one. The combined audiences of Microsoft and Yahoo! would accomplish something that can only be good for the market: push Google to innovate even more, in the face of a much larger competitor than it has been facing until now in the search space.
It remains to be seen if the DNAs of the two companies can work together… Definitely interesting times ahead. Regardless of Yahoo! taking up Microsoft on the bid or not, these are very interesting times.
My bet? Yahoo! will say “no.” What will result of that? Talk to me a year from today. 
Four years. That is how long it took for a new Microsoft Office for Mac to arrive, but it will be a reality this coming Tuesday, coinciding with the kickoff of MacWorld 2008 in San Francisco (no, I won’t be in attendance).
If you, like me, thought that MS Office for Mac 2008 sucked, make sure to pre-order your copy of the 2008 version by following the link below and you will also be contributing to make this blog a few pennies richer!
How it’s done? Don’t kill yourself over it: it can’t be done… not natively, but it can be “hacked” by using Rules.
Follow the instructions on this PDF so you can let your colleagues that suffer in Entourage hell like you that you will not be in the office in the coming days…
Word to the wise: Do not (trust me), DO NOT send yourself a test message from within the actual account you are setting up this rule for. You will go into an endless loop of “Out of Office” replies that you can only stop by disabling the rule. 
(yeah, you guessed it: I don’t love Entourage)
… when they can be complicated?
Reading about an amazing roundup of tools for developers in SolutionWatch, I rediscovered this gem. Enjoy!
I was just reading about the possibility of a friendly takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft.
My first reaction was one of amazement, not only at the action but the dollar figure attached to it: potentially $50 billion. But, as I think more about it, and reading other people’s comments, what comes to mind is: for the first time in quite a while, the playing field may level since Google started turning into the 900-pound gorilla it is now.
What will happen to the Yahoo! products we’ve learned to love (Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Mail) after a takeover by MS? If they are smart, hopefully they’ll cross-breed with existing “equivalent” MS products, to bring in better and friendlier web practices.
On a side note, how’s this for interesting news too? Buried within an announcement made by Yahoo! yesterday, they leaked that “Flickr will ‘soon’ allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.”
I cannot agree more with the statement Business 2.0 makes about this move: “The comments most people leave [in YouTube] are unintelligent. Flickr users, on the other hand, have more to say, and are more active in adding notes, comments, and tags to other people’s photos.”
YouTube, Google:
Better shape up!
Thoughts, anybody?