Ever since Yahoo announced to buy the social bookmarking service del.icio.us about a week ago, it has been plagued with instability. More often than not, I get an error message when I try to access the website. At the time of this writing I am getting the following error: “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible." I realize that the announcement of the acquisition must be causing a lot of extra traffic for del....
Firefox 1.5 has been released. You can grab it here. Some of the new features are improved popup blocking (I am curious about this one, now that some sites have figured out how to circumvent the previous version’s popup blocker), drag & drop tab reordering, noticeably faster navigation using the Back and Forward buttons, and more. You can find out more details about the new features in the Firefox 1.5 Release Notes....
Google has just released a beta version of their RSS Reader. I gave it a quick whirl, but so far it hasn’t blown me away. In typical Google style, the layout and UI is nice and clean (and very similar to Gmail). Contrary to other aggregators (such as Bloglines), Google Reader only displays a single post per page, rather than a whole list of posts. It provides keyboard shortcuts to easily navigate between posts....
It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, bookmarks, news, arbitrary RSS feeds, search history, and more. I’m not quite sure if I like it, even though it could undoubtedly be useful....
Gmail just keeps getting better. I’ve been using it for about half a year now, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with it. But a few days ago, they added another very useful feature: It is now possible to associate your Gmail account with one or more other email addresses (verification required) and specify those in the “From” field when sending emails. You can specify the default address in your settings, but you can also conveniently change this using a drop-down on a per message basis....