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Inbox / Charles Bermant
Yahoo! Web mail's best feature is carryover notepad

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This will (I hope) be the last in an informal series about Web mail services offering huge amounts of online storage in a move to give us more than we ever imagined. With Gmail, Spymac and Yahoo!, they have raised expectations and minimum standards. So when Hotmail finally catches up, it will prompt a big "so what?"

Perhaps we should greet Yahoo! with the same wet noodle. Its new iteration offers 100 MB of storage, compared with 1 GB for its aforementioned competitors. But let's get real. It will take a while for most of us to fill all this space. To put it in Texas terms, there are some places where it doesn't matter if you have a 100-acre ranch or a 1,000-acre ranch.

For those who prefer the larger virtual spread, Yahoo!'s enhanced option offers a whopping 2 GB storage for $19.95 a year. This sounds ridiculous. But if the past is any indicator, people always stretch the available technology to the absolute limit, and then yell for more.

Yahoo! gets away with offering "only" 100 MB because it is a proven market leader with a huge installed base. Many of these people, hearing about Gmail and the inevitable imitators, might feel tempted to make a switch. But with an automatic upgrade, they will be less inclined to make a change, especially if they've been using that particular mailbox for a while.

With this new iteration, Yahoo! claims a streamlined interface, faster search abilities and the availability of millions of dormant e-mail names, designed to increase people's options. All of these things are pretty insignificant, the interface looks pretty much the same and search speed will always be at the mercy of your connection. As for those names, this will be worthwhile only if they decide to post them somewhere so we can go in and take a look.

The cool part of Yahoo! is something that was already there. The notepad allows you to scrawl little messages to yourself from anywhere in the world. Imagine hopping from one Internet cafe to another, jotting down recollections and minutiae. Or you can back up important numbers, just in case you lose the guidebook with all the notes in the margin. This is where that 100 MB will come in handy.

On the surface, it's cool to have all this extra free storage. In reality, it's just data waiting to be managed. Whoever can harness this and make it useful — the Yahoo! Notepad is a start — will make a difference. Or as Microsoft used to say, "Change the world."

If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at cbermant@seattletimes.com. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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