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March 07, 2006
The Blogbar wars?
Sabeer Bhatia, the Indian-born, Stanford-educated entrepreneur who gave the world HotMail, then sold it to Microsoft for umm, $US400 million (no wonder, according to an admiring Indian journalist, he's full of worldly wisdom, and has an arresting smile) is about to launch a service which will allow you to leave your footprints all over the Web. Oh. And get your HotMail faster.
It didn't need all that much worldly wisdom for him to realise that 10 years after the Hotmail deal, Microsoft hadn't done a lot to speed up the service. His idea - well, actually the idea of a former Cisco employee - is to provide users with a "Blogbar" [FAQ here]which will download unread e-mail messages and store them in a local cache while a first message is being read. Users will then be able to access unread messages from their computer’s own memory instead of having to retrieve them from the internet. The Blogbar is available for Internet Explorer only, but a Firefox version is "coming soon".
Meanwhile, as they're browsing Web sites, they can also use the Blogbar to "write your thoughts and opinions directly on the web page you are browsing", without leaving it.
"Tell the world what you think!" the site exhorts, then read what other bloggers have to say about the site. We're not absolutely sure how this works, but we confess to a slight touch of anxiety. Somehow we wonder if the world is ready for this. Maybe some bloggers might feel hostile about people writing whatever they like on their blog, particularly when a feature called CC Blog CC Blog "automatically posts the blog you wrote on BlogEverywhere.com to other popular blogging websites".
On the other hand, maybe it will catapult unknown blogs to fame. Who knows? Could this be the "enhancement" that starts a world-wide blog war? We can scarcely wait.
Posted by cw at March 7, 2006 06:01 PM
Comments
See the thread "links on content pages" in the "General Software Stuff" in the forum. It appeared after you posted this, Charles.
Maybe there's a deliberate campaign going on this, perhaps that's why the thread starter did what he did.
Cheers, Ryan (aka Newman)
Posted by: Newman at March 8, 2006 03:53 AM