Okay, BLADAM friends, apologies for two rants in a row (in a sadly otherwise dry AdamBloggingSeason), but… why does T-mobile—an international company—charge so much for international calling, roaming, and texting?

And Cingular—the only other American mobile phone company I know of that supports international roaming—has rates that are even worse, from what I gather.

Anyway, on T-Mobile, the rates for me to call from the U.S. overseas are more than triple what I’d pay via a discount calling card or even AT&T Callvantage.  Calling from overseas to *anywhere* ranges from about $1 to $4 a minute for incoming OR outgoing calls.

But what *really* gets my hide is T-Mobile’s charge for text messages sent to and from my friends in Europe.  15 cents each for me to send a handful of text characters, and 35 cents each to receive the same.  What the heck?!  I know, I know, this voluminous amount of data has to potentially pass through companies that aren’t T-Mobile, but still!  And no, T-Mobile’s varied texting-bundle plans do *not* include international SMSes.

I’ve played with various SMS options online, but haven’t found any to be reliable for either sending or receiving text messages internationally.  Oh lazyweb, anyone know of good options? (other than calling up T-Mobile and telling them they’re provincial jerks for their usurious rates, which, I admit, doesn’t exactly qualify as a good option)

A few weeks ago, I already started transitioning all of my feeds off of Bloglines. Why?
- It's slow.
- It's down too often.
- Reorganizing feeds (moving them to different folders, etc.) is worse than being stuck in a closet with Vanna White. Night after night after night after night.
- It's similarly painful to mark just a few articles in a feed as read or unread.

I've moved over to Newzcrawler, a stellar newsreader app for Windows. Beyond just tons of cool power features, it also lets me pretty easily sync my feeds between my desktop and laptop using an external FTP site (okay, geeky, I know).

* * *

With that said, I've still been hoping to see some vast improvements in the online-reader front. Rojo seems to be getting better. And I've heard rumblings over other cool services as well. When I learned today that Google had entered this space, I was extremely excited. Please, I thought, give us another Gmail. Or Maps! :D If not for me, at least for my less-geeky friends whom I'm dying to get into feed reading.

So far, alas, I'm rather disappointed in the Google Reader. I know it'll get better, but for now, Googlers...

1) It's too cluttered and overwhelming.
Hide some stuff. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but blog text blends into all the other text and I find it just tiring to spend more than a few minutes in Reader.

2) No mouseovers?!

3) Ambiguities
Is "Read items" a description or an action? Okay, admittedly this is rather a nitpick, but it is a top-line link .

4) Search what?!
When I see a search box at the top of the page, I expect to be able to search the content-in-context. In other words, if I'm in my Gmail account, I expect to search my mail. If I'm in Reader, I expect to search for a string in my read and/or unread feed items. From an expected user-action standpoint, what's likely to be more common: adding new feeds, or working with the feeds one already has?

5) Save me from overload!
There's no way to mark an entire feed as read. Or group of feeds.

6) Why the weird quasi-breadcrumbs in center focus?!
Why do I want to see "New Subscription" "New Subscription" article article article... Just show me new articles. If I want to see what I'm subscribed to, I'll go to the Your Subscriptions tab!

My prediction:
Wikis have not yet hit critical mass, but they will by 2006 Q3 when I predict Yahoo! will unveil a well-integrated wiki feature called "Y! Whiteboards."

So what's a wiki?!
First, those in the un-know may be wondering what the heck a wiki is. Yeah, yeah, it sounds just as goofy as "blog," but it's worth getting to know.

A wiki is basically an application on the Web that lets practically anyone edit or even create pages and easily link them together. Think of it as an extendable set of whiteboards, with all interested folks having handy virtual dry-erase markers and erasers. It's a fabulous albeit admittedly not flawless solution enabling groups of people to collaborate on a particular topic or defined scope of topics.

Okay, gimme an example!
One of the grandest wikis of them all is Wikipedia, a massive free encyclopedia. Although not without controversies and challenges of its own, Wikipedia has inarguably grown up to be a valuable and impressive resource. And of course, it does have an entry on Wikis

Or take my new humble wiki, "Lindy Hop Whiteboard Supreme." A distinguishing factor of the (hosted) software I'm using is that folks using Firefox and IE can use rich-text controls to edit pages. Even so, though, I've found contributions to be few and far between so far. :| [Want to try it out? Play in the playpen ]

As hyped in breathless news articles over the last few days, Google came out with their own IM (instant messaging) client this evening, Google Talk.



VERDICT: Clean, uncluttered, intuitive, and rather unexciting in its current version.

[See other BLADAM entries on Gmail... and also, as I've noted earlier, please do not ask me for an invite; I don't have any to spare... sorry! - Adam]

A number of Gmail users -- including yours truly -- have noticed that Gmail has seemingly upped the service storage limit to one terabyte. That's right... 1,000,000 -- one million -- megabytes (compared to Hotmail's two megabyte free storage limit, for instance). To put this into perspective... even if you got 250 e-mails each DAY (averaging four kilobytes each), it would take you about 2,739 YEARS to fill up this much space.

Of course, there's certainly the possibility that the new indication of a terabyte of space is a Gmail bug. Gmail is, after all, still very much in beta. But what if it's not a bug? What if the terabyte storage limit is really, well, real? Would we truly want a terabyte of space? Or would this lead to more problems than benefits?

Okay, not really . But maybe I should go into fortune telling, because I had written about the newly released Google Groups2 Discussion List Service two weeks ago on the "What Should Google Do" group on orkut.com:

[As I've noticed in my earlier Gmail commentary, I unfortunately do not have the ability to offer invites... sorry :( - Adam]

With all the coverage of Gmail (to which I've somewhat guiltily contributed), one might snicker that Gmail's being positioned as something that's going to change the world.

Well, almost.

I seriously think that Gmail may substantially change the way people deal with e-mail... sending, receiving, storing... leading to some interesting and not-insubstantial behavioral changes.

HARK! A powerful new technology! Let's [try it / ignore it / ban it]!

History repeats itself. When new technology is developed, there are the early adopters who coo excitedly, those living under a rock who grunt "huh?" and varying degrees of those who issue warnings, which -- at least as of late -- seem to fit into one of several convenient categories:
1) Fighting against terrorism
2) Safeguarding values (e.g., "Protecting the children!")
3) Protecting privacy

To simultaneously save me from getting writer's cramp and enable you to finish reading this essay in under two hours, I'm just going to tackle the issue of privacy for now.

[In case you didn't already notice, I wrote a pretty detailed review of Gmail earlier, in which I also noted that I'm unfortunately unable to procure accounts for folks. Sorry! For those who already have accounts, I hope the tips below are useful and/or fun - Adam]

So, you're one of the Gmail testers and you want more bang for the buck, eh? Try these tips on for size:

SENDING & SHORTCUTS
- Send mail to fellow Gmail'er by just entering their username in the TO, CC, or BCC spot. No need to include @gmail.com

- Did you reserve .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and now wish you had left out the darn period? It's not too late! For whatever reason, Gmail treats that e-mail address the same as one without a period (and visa versa), so .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) works just as well as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). As you may have guessed, Gmail is flexible with regards to capitalizations, too!

- Using the handy-dandy spell-checker and want to quickly Resume Checking without using the mouse? Just hit 'R', an undocumented shortcut key in this context.

There are many times in which I've felt that people -- myself included -- would benefit from logging off and getting a life. This sort of cynicism (or optimism, depending on one's take) is heightened when I read about people falling in love with someone else that they've "met" only online. Hey, I'll admit... been there, done that. And never again.

So, too, do I often ask myself why I continue to feel so passionate about online communities and online networking. With all the flaming and faking and fluffery and general bullshit, isn't it all just a waste of time?

Then every once in a while, I'm reminded why Online matters.