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Internet Marketing

Yahoomail or Gmail?

April 16, 2008

I’ve been using the new Yahoo mail for quite sometime now and initially I used to think that it’s because of some initial glitches that the performance is so slow and bad. But it’s been months since I’m using the same and I don’t see any improvement in their performance. Somehow the moment you open that in-mail chat window my laptop goes for a toss. It becomes so damn slow. Though I think it has got nothing to do with my laptop as the same machine is being used for so many things including the in-mail chat service of gmail and there it works absolutely wonderful.

 

My first email id happens to be a yahoo id and when I had opened up my first email id more than a decade back, I used to be thrilled with Yahoo messenger and other services of Yahoo as compared to Rediff / Indiatimes mail and chat services. I used to love those cute li’ll smileys so much and everything about Yahoo used to be so cool…I would say, I was quite a hard-core Yahoo loyal user but slowly their product started getting deteriorating. Then came gmail and for most of the practical purposes, gmail proved to be a better option than Yahoo. Many people like me very soon migrated to Gmail for most of their regular email interactions.

 

Well, I know market share wise, Yahoo still dominates the email market but I think service of Yahoo is getting more and more hopeless day by day. They have got one of the worst spam guards…on any normal day my spam counts are anytime thrice or four times than my normal email count in my yahoo inbox! I don’t know what spam guard gmail has adopted but it works wonderfully atleast for me. Also host of other benefits like security, size of the mail box, archiving options, convenience of smooth in-mail chat facility etc are just few of out of the whole gamut of benefits which gmail offers to a consumer. So for me as a consumer despite Yahoo mail launching new features everyday, its Gmail which rocks and serves my purpose anyday better than Yahoo.

India with highest virus ratio

February 20, 2008

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Earlier we were in hit list of spam and now virus! Well, this is just one of the downsides of internet penetration in India I guess. Few months back I had read it somewhere that as per Govt of India report, 76% of mails originating from India are spam!!! And now there is a report stating one in ever 30 emails in India contains virus! “Virus activity increased across a number of countries in January, including India, which takes the number one spot with 1 in 30.5 emails,” a study conducted by a web security services firm MessageLabs said. India has been identified as the most vulnerable destination for virus as well as spam. The ratio of virus attack in western countries is far lesser in western countries. Infact in New Zealand its 1:768, in Australia its 1:298.7 & in US its 1:191.5.

Phew, so where are we as far as internet security is concerned? On an average I get somewhere between 12-20 spam mails on each of my account – yahoo, gmail etc. Despite my all trials of deleting / unsubscribing from all those junk mailers, there is not much refuge from the same. And every fourth email which I get is having an attachment with .pif / …. kind of unknown extensions which surely contain virus. Well, regardless of best possible anti-virus software & spam filters, those junk emails keep flooding my mail boxes everyday. Infact yesterday only I was trying to delete my spam messages from my yahoo id which has got the worst spam filter I guess and after deleting a few I just felt sick & tired of doing the same thing again and again! Well, no wonder if we accounted for 76% spam origin & 1:30.5 virus attacks as the repercussion of the same can be observed in my own inboxes as well J. I’m wondering – is it the phenomenal growth in internet penetration in India or is our poor security systems that we are such a susceptible target for spammers & virus attackers?

IBNlive’s new positioning – Sexy women at IBNlive?????

February 5, 2008

Of late I’ve been observing these advertisements of IBNlive.com all across web. Whichever site you go to, you see a google ad of IBN which says sexy women at ibnlive.com. Displayed below are some of the screenshots of ads which caught my attention while surfing through news sites, google or blogs.

I’m seriously confused, why a serious site like ibnlive.com is using promo messages which read like this? Isn’t it contradictory to the brand image of ibnlive? Well, we all know that sex & women as keywords sell a lot in search engines but still… catching attention by using messages like these by a site like IBNlive is quite weird and ridiculous. Are they short of genuine content that they are resorting to gimmicks like these? To me it projects absolute desperation of IBNlive to increase their web traffic & readership. Don’t’ know the logic or thought behind this but looks like the brand person or the online agency has been given some tough task of increasing their web traffc & hits by X % hee hee hee… Well, quite bizarre!