So it seems, the war of “who’s got the coolest ajax portal” has it’s first counter-attack (being the first bombing done by Google).
Tonight Yahoo! decided to release a slightly and even more ajaxed version of Flickr.com, which now is not beta anymore, behold “Gamma”, first time I ever see this, I’m not sure what to say, if its clever, or ridiculous, clearly a marketing manouver, none the less some of the changes are good.
The most notable change is the Organizer, it’s no longer a CPU consuming Flash file.
It’s all AJAXED, supports drag n drop, and its not as intuitive as the old flash movie, at least for me, I know it’ll take a little while for all of us to adapt.
One thing I didn’t see on it, which I really need, is the ability to send pictures to groups or pools. If someone sees it please correct me If I’m wrong, but I spent good 3 or 4 minutes looking for it and nothing. They definitively need a way to drag a bunch of pictures to a Pool or Group of pictures.
So that’s what I could tell on a quick glance at flickr. (Thanks Nany for letting me know that Flickr.com looked “cooler” tonight)
Then the biggest blow on Gmail’s stomach. Yahoo Mail Beta.
This certainly had my mouth open when I tried it, I was really looking forward to use it. It’s definitively close to a simple version of thunderbird inside your browser.
I could:
-> Select multiple emails with shift, and then delete them hitting my delete key.
-> Compose two emails at once, it creates a tab for each composal.
-> Drag and drop emails to folders
The calendar, and notes are still not ready.
However… al this coolnes, I don’t think I’ll leave my @gmail.com account, that address it’s too damn valuable to me, I couldn’t go back to emailing with my @yahoo.com email again.
Maybe Yahoo! might want to allow users to use their web interface to access @gmail.com accounts.