Category: Internet

GAFYD slowness

I have been using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) for my floatingsun.net email for a while now (earlier I was using the email setup at my hosting provider, but moved away because of the lack of adequate spam filtering). In the beginning, it was just a joy and everything was nice and peachy.

Google Apps

However, over time, the service has been gradually deteriorating. Since the past few weeks I have noticed a significant increase in latency. Meaning that if I open mail.google.com side-by-side with mail.google.com/a/floatingsun.net, my “regular” gmail account loads up much, much faster than my floatingsun.net account. This despite the fact that my regular gmail account has at least 100x the messages on my floatingsun.net account. And in fact, there have been several occassions in the recent past where it doesn’t load at all, or fails with a server error.

Not to mention that IMAP access has been horrendous recently. Throughout the day, email takes forever to open in my IMAP client (it opens up relatively faster on the web interface) and I get frequent disconnections from the server.

I don’t mean to beat up on Google. I must admit that I am on the free plan, so I really have no reason to complain. But gmail is also free. I have a feeling Google is deliberately imposing some kind of quality-of-service differentiation between paid Google Apps accounts vs free ones. I am keeping an eye on the status dashboard — it says no issues but my IMAP is still flaky. Is anyone else seeing poor performance on free GAFYD accounts?

Screens around the web: password restrictions

I wrote earlier about how several high profile web sites ensure that their users can NOT have strong passwords. Here are a few screen shots to prove my point:

Chase

AT&T

American Express

American Funds

Note that all these web sites provide financial services, and are the most dangerous to users if their accounts get hacked. Account access would in most cases make available to the hacker other personal details like credit card numbers and SSN. Some one please, PLEASE explain to me the logic behind such restrictions as putting a silly upper limit on password length (8??!! WTF!!!), and disallowing special characters. It’s retarded.

Why bharat1 sucks?

Desicritics had a glowing review of bharat1.com. I don’t have anything specifically against it, but I think the review is a bit biased. So to play the devil’s advocate, let me point out why this so-called “preimer news aggregator” is not as great.

There are many ways a website can distinguish itself — user experience, content, functionality, presentation etc. I don’t think bharat1 excels in any of these areas. Really, the only think bharat1.com has done is pre-select a bunch of feeds. I don’t know why that is good, unless they have demonstrated that their feed selection is really great.

No new functionality: The author himself points out, Netvibes has similar features. Thats actually incorrect. Netvibes is a lot more than just a news aggregator — they are essentially trying to build a web based desktop replacement. In some senses Netvibes is a portal. And Netvibes is not alone — there are several others (Google IG, Goowy, Nowsy, Pageflakes etc etc).

In particular, all of these already let users move around content — so thats nothing new. They also offer a whole bunch of news feeds, and let users add their own news feeds — so thats nothing new either. Pre-selecting some news feeds is not that great — anyone can put up their OPML file to share and thats it.

What about “tags”? Thats not new either. Gregarius has tags. Technorati always had tags. Since you can get feeds for tags from Technorati and a whole bunch of other places, its not that great a deal. I think Google News does a much better job of “clustering” news — I wouldn’t rely on tags to represent “News Topics”.

Not only this, Netvibes et al. are more like platforms. They have open APIs, that let people build on top of the framework. They use community to build up traction. In its present form, bharat1.com is a one way road — there is absolutely no community involvement. They don’t even talk about how they discover tags, or a list of news sources they track.

Remembering the positions of the blocks? Are you kidding me?! That is so not new, or impressive in any which way. People have been stuffing things into cookies for the past decade or so. And that is the “most important part of the site”?

How does the ability to add my own blog to the site make it unique? If you can add any feed (as with Netvibes and friends), your blog is just another feed. I’m sorry, I don’t see the distinction. On the other hand, bharat1.com is probably the only aggregator which doesn’t offer its own news feed. What good is an aggregator if I can’t puts its RSS feed somewhere else?

What they call a “News Map” is better known as a [[wp>Tag_cloud]]. And if you find that impressive, check out News.com‘s hot news interface. As for the “minimalist” interface, nothing beats Google IG.

Finally, the site is not “ready”. There is no proper “About Us” page. The Policy page is linked to the “Contact” Page.

Like I said earlier, I have nothing against bharat1.com. I just felt that the author of the review had not done his homework. Perhaps bharat1.com will become all that and more, but in its current state, I think the review does more harm to it than good. All that glorification (“employs a unique combination of technology and creativity and brings to you the best of the web in a nice little package.”) just builds up false expectations, and in this fast moving market, don’t expect disappointed visitors to come back.

Web based password manager

Does anyone know of a good web based password manager? I’m inclinced to hack up my own, but I wanted to dig around a little bit first.

Password management has always been an issue with me — there are just way too many passwords to remember, and even though I’m usually lazy and end up using one of 2-3 passwords in most places, I still need to remember login names (why can’t websites explicitly mention that they use email addresses as logins). And sometimes I do create new passwords, which are just impossible to remember.

I’m sure someday we will move away from text based encryption schemes and have some funky audio/visual passwords which won’t require me to remember arbitrary strings of text. But that day is not today, and so I need some solution. Traditionally I’ve been using applications on my desktop to keep track of my passwords (my own Starfish, Revelation etc) and that has scaled nicely so far.

But now its getting out of hand. With all the Web2 hype, new and interesting startups come up on a daily basis. All of them need your email address and password. I have more than 5 GMail accounts. Several bugzilla accounts. Credit cards. Insurance companies. Banks. Airlines. Portals. Passwords, passwords and more passwords. Thanks to spam, now you need some kind of authentication mechanism to get to anything useful on the web. So my list of usernames and passwords is becoming unmanageably long.

Starfish and Revelation were fine, but I would have to sync my password files across systems. But when I was travelling without my laptop, I’d be stuck — so I do need a web front end. Besides, this seems to me the kind of web-app almost everyone needs. So how come I haven’t seen a cool AJAX-ified web based password management tool yet?

Any takers?