What your email provider says about you

Hunch Blog runs a rather massive statistical study of users of different email providers – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL.  I’ll just copy the snapshot of findings here for my own quick references.  But you, you should have a look at the original article.

  • AOL users are most likely to be overweight women ages 35-64 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 10+ years, and have children. AOL users live in the suburbs and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. AOL users mostly read magazines, have a desktop computer, listen to the radio, and watch TV on 1-3 DVRs in their home. At home, they lounge around in sweats. AOL users are optimistic extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team.
  • Gmail users are most likely to be thin young men ages 18-34 who are college-educated and not religious. Like other young Hunch users, they tend to be politically liberal, single (and ready to mingle), and childless. Gmail users live in cities and have traveled to five or more countries. They’re career-focused and plugged in — they mostly read blogs, have an iPhone and laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, they lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. Gmail users prefer salty snacks and are introverted and entrepreneurial. They are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.
  • Hotmail users are most likely to be young women of average build ages 18-34 (and younger) who have a high school diploma and are not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, single, and childless. Hotmail users live in the suburbs, perhaps still with their parents, and have traveled to up to five countries. They mostly read magazines and contemporary fiction, have a laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, Hotmail users lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. They’re introverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. They consider themselves more pessimistic, but sometimes it depends on the situation.
  • Yahoo! users are most likely to be overweight women ages 18-49 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 1-5 years, and have children. Yahoo! users live in the suburbs or in rural areas and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. They mostly read magazines, are almost equally likely to have a laptop or desktop computer, listen to the radio and cds, and watch TV on 1-2 DVRs in their home. At home, Yahoo! users lounge around in pajamas. They’re extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. Yahoo! users are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.

 

Shorter URL? Longer URL? Funny URL?

This Slashdot discussion got me started.  The discussion is about URL shortening services and their impact on the Web.  Needless to say, most people who care about the Web, hate all kinds of third-party URL manipulations with a passion.   The reasons are numerous, and here are two that annoy me the most:

  • Obscurity.  You have no idea where you are going anymore.  It can be the newest scam website, an image, a huge video, or anything else for that matter.  When you see full URL, even if you don’t always can understand the full path, at least the domain name is a hint.
  • Latency. Most (all?) URL shortening services work via a redirect.  So whenever you click on the URL to visit a page, instead of going to the page directly you are going to the web service which expands that URL first, and then redirects you further.  This takes time and gives you nothing in return.

A lot of Slashdot people feel similar.  Yet it still makes for an interesting discussion.  Here are the bits that I picked up:

  • HugeUrl.com – web service that does the opposite of what URL shortening services do.  It takes any URL and makes it huge.  Just for the fun of it.
  • ShadyUrl.com – web service that obscures given URLs, making them look very suspicious. Also, for the fun of it.
  • There are a number of browser plugins that automate the expansion of short URLs, either on-demand or as you go.  Here is one for Firefox.  Here is one for Google Chrome.
  • Last year’s Coding Horror blog post discussing the problems of URL shortening services.

Also after a brief discussion and fooling around with my colleagues, I learned about Abcd-Whatever, which is a web service that lives on an extremely long domain name and offers free email addresses.  Such email addresses are hard for people to type correctly, impossible for some SPAM bots to grab, and excellent for testing web forms.

OhLife – private blogging via email

Over the years that I’ve been blogging, quite a few people asked me if I know of any easy way to maintain a private blog.  They seemed to not care about the rest of the world and just wanted a private diary, but without paper and without too much technical hassle.  Of course, there are many applications, like WordPress, that could be installed on a personal computer and used in private mode.  But that still seemed too much work for a diary.  So I never really had a good answer, except use any text editor and save files in some date-based directory structure.

Recently I came across a very elegant solution to the problem though.  OhLife is a simple and straightforward blogging service.  It has two very distinct features that together set it apart from most other blogging services.  It enforces private blogs – only you see your entries.  No public stuff, no friends, no nothing.  And they help you build a habit out of blogging by sending you an email every night with a question “How did your day go?“.  This seems so natural and so simple that I can’t think of anybody who won’t be able to do it.

OhLife sample email

Gmail in console browser links

I was quite surprised today how well the standard HTML (non-JavaScript) version of Gmail works in console browser links.  Everything is there – folders, labels, messages in inbox, search, and even compose.  I don’t think that too many people are actually using this version, but kudos to Google for still supporting it – in those desperate times, when nothing else works, it’s nice to have at least this front covered.

Finally! Per account signatures in Gmail

I’ve been waiting for this feature for years and finally it arrived!  For those of us who have multiple accounts configured in Gmail, custom per-account signatures are supported.  No more copy-pasting from templates, Greasemonkey scripts, and Canned responses trickery.  Go to your Settings and configure a separate signature for each account.  And it gets better than that – you can even do rich-text signatures if you use HTML emails a lot.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you to the whole Gmail team and those guys who made this handy feature happen. I wanted this for a while!