Just realised that I used to have a yahoo account and actively used it for mail and chat. I must have created that id back in 2002, when I joined kgp and was introduced to the might of the thing called world wide web. Then, a well known search website, called Google, introduced its mail and chat software, sometime in 2005. And within a span of a few months, it had won me over from Yahoo, a service I had been using for almost three years. And why could it win; I won't go over what was/is better in Google than Yahoo. The bottomline is that more of my friends were using Google Talk and hence I moved to Google and so on...
Just to give you a perspective - just now, I logged into my yahoo mail account after so many days and found that the last mail in my inbox is dated 9th May 2005 - almost 2 and a half years ago. Actually, I had stopped using the Yahoo account completely; was forced to log in due to some reasons this December. I had forgotten the password and other security details; it was a tough job getting the password back :P
PS: I just did some googling and found that Gmail was launched somewhere roundFeb 2005 April 2004 (edit: as indicated by Parag in the comments, and I will accept his word on this); and Google Talk around July 2005 (found an article dated Aug 2005 which says Google Talk already launched.). Any idea where this information would be available on Google websites; did some cursory search, but couldn't find it.
EDIT: Parag has summarized the advantages of Gmail over Yahoo in the comments (my post never intended to do this comparison; that's the reason I missed out on these differences :) ). Though I disagree with him on one thing, if I remember correctly, the chat facility from within the Gmail page came much later on than Gmail became common usage. Though personally I prefer the desktop client when I am using my own system. It of course is a great boon when you are on an alien system without the client.
EDIT: I am in no way affiliated to either Google or Yahoo.
Technorati Tags: google, chat, www,
Just to give you a perspective - just now, I logged into my yahoo mail account after so many days and found that the last mail in my inbox is dated 9th May 2005 - almost 2 and a half years ago. Actually, I had stopped using the Yahoo account completely; was forced to log in due to some reasons this December. I had forgotten the password and other security details; it was a tough job getting the password back :P
PS: I just did some googling and found that Gmail was launched somewhere round
EDIT: Parag has summarized the advantages of Gmail over Yahoo in the comments (my post never intended to do this comparison; that's the reason I missed out on these differences :) ). Though I disagree with him on one thing, if I remember correctly, the chat facility from within the Gmail page came much later on than Gmail became common usage. Though personally I prefer the desktop client when I am using my own system. It of course is a great boon when you are on an alien system without the client.
EDIT: I am in no way affiliated to either Google or Yahoo.
Technorati Tags: google, chat, www,
2 comments:
Gmail was born on 1st April 2004.
and I totally agree with you but there are points you have missed totally. There were quite a few reasons why I shifted to gmail:
1. Excellent mail search. I loved it and still is one of the most useful features which gmail offered as an innovation.
2. There filters are awesome. I remember having the same for yahoo but they never had the same number of options.
3. This one was the clincher. I can chat with frnds on the browser using the excellent gmail facility. I have never even once thought of dlding gtalk and not only tht I can search my chat wchi is awesome.
4. Not tht gr8 but if you ll notice there spam detection rocks. I mark some random mails i get from a user as spam twice and all his mails start going to my spam box. Now I hated it in yahii when i manually amrked all messages from same user as spam over and over again..
5. There UI is simple and intutive. The new version of yahoo has a lot of these features but there UI suks period.
6. The only down side was the fact that I cannot use it from slow dial up connection I had but for tht also these guys provided a basic HTML view which though suks kept me in touch from my house with a stupid connection..
Hence I do agree tht many ppl did move to gtalk coz of there frnds but the early adopters of this service actually used it as they fell in love with this gem of a service...
Parag :)
I personally feel its Google spam protection that made gmail and gtalk so successful. Not just yahoo mail but yahoo messenger also is full of spam ( offline spams.. )
Also gtalk came with voice chat that made it popular , initially I remember Gtalk was being used just for voice chat , also at this time Yahoo voice chat was either paid or buggy.
searching the mail.. credit goes to gmail , but I like Yahoo Mail search (new feature )much better than gmail search , while it takes advance search option in gtalk to categorize the results (in to , from..and all) ,in yahoo its always in that format.
simple UI is something that is brought by google.
finally feeling of being associated with Google made ppl to move from yahoo to gmail.
BTW: Yahoo mails still is used by much more ppl that gmail.
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