Chronicles of a Jongleur

* Rediff.com as it looks, with and without Ad-Block. I understand websites need to make money to stay in business. But this? Wonder when Rediff will start going the way www.bluemountain.com did.

* On a separate note, Microsoft seems to have left no stone unturned in its bid to bulldoze all its webspace  with the “Live” moniker.(Trivia: Microsoft and its subsidiaries own some of the larget web real estate spots in cyberspace. www.microsoft.com is technically the largest website on the planet.). CNET has this interesting article on how this attempt at re-branding its entire suite does not seem to have made a mark on user’s minds. The “Live” avatar of Hotmail at first glance does not seem to be totally smooth, but they still need to figure that people on dial-up lines are going to be tearing their hair out as they wait for an eternity for pages to load up. Those on alternate browsers can forget about even sampling various Live services; MS still seems to want to impose Internet Explorer as the de-facto browser for most of its web applications.

* Speaking of major web-mail services trying to adopt a desktop-application look and feel (a-la MS-Outlook or Thunderbird), one thing that puzzles me is the number of months (or years) the folks at Google, Yahoo or MS choose to keep their services in Beta. Honestly, whats the fun thing in letting your users know that you have been in beta for the last thirty three months? And going by the looks of it, every Web-2.0 (or whatever) company seems to think that a miniscule “Beta” next to their banner heading is some sort of fashion accessory (Think Flickr, Zoho,  Orkut, etc.) . Or is it just a legal loophole to prevent irate users from suing the damn company in case  they (the Web 2.0 company) mess something up?