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calin view of the web development world

2005/7/28

funny Yahoo CAPTCHA!

@ 09:06 AM (33 months, 26 days ago)
Can you understand what the image below says? Cause if you don't, you're definitely a robot:

Read the rest of this entry ... (91 words left)

2005/7/25

AdBrite future, not bright at all

@ 10:48 AM (33 months, 29 days ago)
http://blog.adbrite.com/mb/images/adbrite-logo.gifIt's been a few days since I created my AdBrite account. My intention was to target the "blog hosting" area as a seller. Supposedly a great banner management tool, with high target text or image ads that should pay better than Adsense. That's the regular comercial blabla, now let's look what's behind this curtain:
  • a minimalistic and non-intuitive interface: as a seller of ad space, reports are difficult to follow and run.
  • lack of advertisers in niche and general segments; overall a disbalance between sellers and buyers in my area.
  • too many adult ads, from unscrupulous webmasters that sell this crap for a few more pennies.
  • lack of help&support FAQ.
I'm glad the AdBrite founder is all in all a rich guy: see his blog, I mean hey he had that famous F...edCompany.com! The website is otherwise great, with an intuitive state-of-the-art sellers directory (he runs there a virtual categorization based on sellers properties which is a hot trend in web development today). There's definitelly a lot of potential here, even if Google's Adsense, Yahoo's Overture and Espotting&FindWhat's Miva competition is sneaking around. But if things continue the way they did, I don't see for me any bright future with AdBrite.

usability issue in Yahoo mail

@ 07:41 AM (33 months, 29 days ago)
Yahoo mail is usually regarded as de-facto standard in web usability applications. Combined with fast hardware, the light and easy to use interface was one of their success recipes. It was such a relief from the cluttered hotmail interface.

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2005/7/11

annoying google toolbar for firefox

@ 11:28 AM (34 months, 13 days ago)
It's nice to finally have a Google toolbar for Firefox; However I have to say that the new XUL tool from Google intended to move the great IE Toolbar to firefox doesn't look that good. The buttons are cluttered, the pagerank image is unclear, maybe on purpose since it carries no meaning anymore. Then the german version I have adds this incredibly annoying mouse tooltip over every english word. Mysteriously, after the install, users get this mouse tooltip and one has to first realize why this happens, then dig up in their options section to remove it. On top of all that, Firefox users now have two google search boxes, one near the URL box (as many defaulted it to Google), and now the Google Toolbar search box, and overall the Firefox top layout becomes more and more cluttered.

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2005/7/1

yahoo launched my web 2.0

@ 07:24 AM (34 months, 23 days ago)
Yahoo recently launched My Web 2.0, a step forward into the search personalization area. "Borrowing" tons of ideas from del.icio.us and similar social networking websites, yahoo's my web applies a sense of community to bookmarks, creating bookmark hubs with delicious-like tags. Then on the main yahoo search page, over the regular search results, they display matches from this "My web" corpus. Probably they will use these web hubs to group websites and improve search relevancy.

Read the rest of this entry ... (91 words left)