And there I was, thinking I would never say it. Well, after two bloody years of lost e-mails, e-mails sent to a thousand recepients a thousand times, e-mails never received because of an attachment "clogging" the inbox, allow me to award the honourary "Fuck Off 2005" award to YPOPs! (or, the Artist Formerly Known as YahooPOPs!, if you wish), the "open-source initiative to provide free" daily anal rape "to Yahoo Mail account" (or is it "a-cunt"?!) owners everywhere. First fucking place.
The second place goes - (you'll never guess it) *drumroll* - to Gmail, the goddamn whore of the Internet, an enterprise that ran out of steam when its accounts could no longer be sold for a few vital organs on eBay and when Yahoo! offered 1GB to free users and 2GB to paid subscribers to counter Gmail's "buttload of storage (and counting)" - bugs strategy.
Gmail started with ads that read your mail (more here and here; Oh, is that illegal?), that substituted cute JavaScript/DHTML/whatever-the-hell tricks for real functionality, no real HTML e-mail capabilities and a really annoying interface, no doubt smoked up by some of those "Like, think different, dude!" idiots. Labels? Starred messages? MS Office 2003 beat Gmail to its "conversation" feature æons ago. To delete a message in Gmail you have to select the message, click on Move to Trash, click on Trash and then click on Delete Forever. So, in other words, to push their little, Big Brother-type "never delete anything and leave it on remote servers" paradigm shift, Gmail (like the iMac with no floppy drive) prematurely forced discomfort on the user, masking it with the hype of the exclusive "Gmail Club," as it was then.
Oh, but this is not all! Gmail is still quite far from all the Snap, Crackle and free POP3 that it promised; in fact, Google engineers were so zealous that every message I sent out through my client, would be sent out and (eventually, at some wonderfully unexpected moment) also sent to me, because Gmail couldn't (and still can't!) instruct many clients to differentiate between its different mailboxes (such as "Outbox," "Sent" and "Trash," for instance; then again, maybe Gmail has a fresh sense of humour). I give Gmail the "Fuck Off 2005," second place.
Now, I'll bet that within seconds of me posting this, some bleeding-heart open-source activist will rain his wrath upon me and righteously condemn me foor dissing those brave men and women that bring us a properly-coded, honest, decent and holy competitor to an otherwise dog-eat-dog industry.
You know what I'd say to that? Stick a sock in it, you damn hippie; Google has long ago (and even before Google Maps and product search gizmos) joined the ranks of faceless, closed-source, oppressive, elitist and cut-throat companies that will eat you alive if you stand in their way. Less comfort, more expansion and growth; less features, more hype. (I honestly hope another high-tech bubble is in the making for those arrogant bastards.)
All this slow and petty selling out - on the part of such previously-wonderful companies and services such as Winamp, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Wikimedia and HowStuffWorks - always runs parallel to maintaining a "down to earth," "people's choice" and "user-friendly" atmosphere of minion faith, while tightening the noose by increasing ad placement, service costs, and the re-selling of primary services, that cheapens the company's image and turns off customers (two words; bah, who am I kidding: Google AdWords).
In such a world, I don't want the corporation that kicks the customer for a quick promo or an easy buck, and hopes to wean them from a free or "exclusive" product to a paid one via some sort of magical peer pressure scheme. I want companies that compete for the gold by bringing in better customer service and tech support, faster servers and more efficient programming; now that's capitalism for you! Give me the new Microsoft and Yahoo!, the "evil giants" that prevailed and gave us really nice products and services that over 90% of the computerised world uses. By the way, Yahoo!, in its MailPlus package, gave me 2GB of storage, no ads, no promo tags, for a mere $19.99 USD - for a year! Now that's service!
Alright; I'll end my angry rant here. Don't e-mail my Gmail account anymore, I'll deactivate it in a month or so. Happy 4 AM! ;)