Switch

I switched to Yahoo Mail Beta and Blogger Beta.

Now i have a outlook like interface for Yahoo mail. I wanted to to try the beta for sometime. I even enrolled myself and Yahoo said that it will notify me when i can start using the new yahoo mail beta. Today in one of the mails sent by Saravanan, i saw the below yahoo ad.

Why keep checking for Mail? The all-new Yahoo! Mail shows you when there are new messages.

Tried the link and i have yahoo mail beta. (I modified the link to remove event information from the link). Try the link above and you can also use the new yahoo mail interface.
Guess what the ad says that it has the feature i found missing in yahoo mail for a long time - Auto checking for new messages. It is configured to a ten minute interval. (Does Yahoo mail check for new messages ? ). Testing it out now ..

It is Ajax interface. It loads quickly. The communication with server seems to be soap-request-response. They are using gsoap module on Apache. It is nice looking UI and no ads as of now.


Coming to the other one - blogger beta,
I tried to login in into blogger today with my old id and my password did not seem to work. I figured out what was the username i used and reset my password. I saw that the login screen and it said you can login via google account. So wanted to check how can i switch to google account. I found out where to start, it is simple. When you login with your blogger id and password, you will see a box in the right side strip talking about blogger beta and has a "Learn More" link. Click on it and switch your a/c to beta.

The help has some problems and where to do the switch is still somewhat confusing. If i login into blogger.com with my google account, i see on the top that i could login with my original blogger id or i can switch to beta blogger site.

The bonus is i dont have to remember one username and password which is good. One more service gets hooked up with my google account.

A noticeable change is that there is no "please wait while your message is posted" kinda progress bar stuff. Also in the posts page, you can see the comments link and it is cool. Need to explore it more. By the way blogger is 7 years old.