Venu Anuganti Blog

Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements.

The good thing about the new Diablo is;  it is completely re-written messenger on top of  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Vista to get the rich GUI look and feel. It has number of interesting features like zooming of contacts to the desired level, multiple color choice, searching of contacts, auto spell checker, phone support, call history etc. This is for sure much better than the currently existing one; and need to see what new features the team will add in the coming days especially towards the social networking of friends as part of YOS.

The only thing that I found missing is the archive of messages; that’s one of the feature that I use a lot by archiving all the messages; so that I can refer back to them at any time.

The screenshots of the messenger can be found from here:

[read more…]

I did not notice for a while; but today noticed that Yahoo! mail has a cool new feature called ‘Download all’. This is indeed useful feature when you have multiple attachments. Normally we used to download each attachment by going through multiple checks. But now ‘Download all’ allows to download all attachments in .zip format; and before you can download; the files are already scanned to avoid another layer of validation.

Looks like Yahoo! mail blog posted this info couple of days back.

On 2005-Dec-05, I received the first check from Yahoo! publisher network (YPN) and may be I started using it a month before that. Even though I could not find any info on when I joined the YPN, may be good idea if they could display in the YPN profile whats the age of the account…I am still successfully running the YPN on all my blog sites (currently this is the only active blog, rest of them are all history).

Before switching to YPN, I used to have Google adwords; and once I made a switch, I never had a chance to look back…and never had any problems with YPN…interestingly I found YPN was displaying the content related ads much better than adwords by picking the tags from the blog entry…where as adwords most of the time used to display random ads which are not even related in any form.

I just read an article on Is Yahoo Gaining on Google and found it interesting. To some extent I am supporting that Yahoo! search results are getting better and better day by day.

I use mostly both Yahoo! and Google for search. And at times when I think I can’t find a result what am looking for, I change between the search and notice that Yahoo! produces better results than Google. Lets see how it continues in the coming days.

The recent addition of search assist from Yahoo! is a cool feature and am sure it will attract many users. At least am happy that search assist has my name when I start typing as … “VENU ANUGANTI”… see the pic below:

Since few months, I was struggling to maintain my local system bookmarks between all my systems (3 desktops + 2 laptops); as each has its own version; and its hard to maintain them and also to keep them in sync. I found an interesting solution with Yahoo! online bookmarks; which offers easy and convenient way of managing the bookmarks online.

The factor which I really liked is; importing from your local browser and also exporting the online version to Internet Explorer or Firefox or XML compatible; so that you can reimport them back to any local browser. This is indeed a good solution to keep all bookmarks online. Not only it maintains; but when you are away from your regular systems; you can still access your bookmarks; just by logging into Yahoo! account; which anyway I do it because I access Yahoo! mail and My Yahoo! all the time.

Here is what I did to keep all my bookmarks in sync in all systems along with keeping a copy online: Exported all my bookmarks from my latop Internet Explorer browser to bookmarks.htm file Imported and exported for rest of the systems; so that all bookmarks on all systems are in sync. Opened Yahoo! online bookmarks and logged in. Click on tools -> Import bookmarks, will lead to Import bookmarks page Selected the bookmarks file and then imported under no category Now, I have all my bookmark links online. I did another export from online version to IE version of bookmarks file from tools -> export bookmarks and reimporting them on local system IE seemed to work fine.

Good to go. Even though the bookmarks failed to import directly from my browser; and filled a bug report on this to the team. This would help not to worry about export and import factors. Another interesting thing is; even if you don’t want to keep the local version of bookmarks in browser; you can stil install Yahoo! toolbar; which includes the online version of bookmaks manager within the tool itself; which is very convenient and handy and syncs with online version automatically when you add any bookmark to local toolbar.