Right, it doesn't make the hotmail situation look better, it just reinforces how bad they both are.
What's also horrible about the yahoo policy is that there is that you can reactive the account (at least for some period of time), but the email archives are deleted. This happened to one of my accounts.
According to the docs and the developer comments they do get deleted. Presumably using the account with xbox live and other services is what's keeping it active, even if you don't log into hotmail directly.
I've also already experienced both situations. When the @live.com accounts became available I registered my name, never used it, eventually forgot to keep logging in to keep it active and it got deleted. Meanwhile, the account I use for xbox live stayed active even though I hadn't logged in to hotmail in at least 2 years until a couple weeks ago.
People know more about the lives of their friends and
family than they ever have before
Wow. I couldn't disagree more. Event notifications are probably the only thing that is substantially more useful in facebook as far as I can tell. Aside from that, the only additional knowledge I've gained from facebook is that a handful of people who I barely remember from high school really like reposting stuff from r/pics. My family has been active on facebook for years, but it's had nothing remotely close to a revolutionary impact on how we communicate.
There's a ton of stuff that goes on in our lives that don't merit notifying everyone about directly, but might merit posting a status or picture to Facebook. It reduces the friction involved in sharing information. I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of the random events in the lives of my family and friends without Facebook. That's valuable to me. I also have a much better idea of the interests of acquaintances and people I haven't seen in a while since the links they share shed some light on that.
Of course more direct communication still happens outside of Facebook. I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to people that you're assuming. Presumably, people wouldn't use Facebook if they didn't find it valuable.
I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of
the random events in the lives of my family and friends
without Facebook
That hasn't been my experience at all. Seriously. Savy people use/used flickr, others used Myspace, and handful used photobucket, others use/used awful photo sharing sites like kodak's and others use/used email. In my experience, most of the additional volume of photos on my wall are from people I should probably defriend since I barely know who they are.
I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to
people that you're assuming
It seems to me, both by looking at my own wall and what people post online, that the nonsense is at most a simple diversion, just like many other diversions that exist and have existed for years. Despite the fact that many of my friends and family members are productive people who are well-known in their respective fields, I have yet to see anything of any substance actually occur on facebook. The closest thing to actual substance in that regard would be events. And the computer illiterates? The volume hasn't changed, they just post their stuff to facebook rather than CCing everyone in their address book 1-3 times a day.
Photo sharing isn't new, but tagging people in photos is, as is being able to effortlessly access anyone's photos without having to figure out where they are and find some link in an old email or something along those lines. I'm not arguing that Facebook has been particularly innovative, though they have been in some cases. My argument is that their product has changed the way people interact with each other, and that's easy to see.
The content of the URL field is dependent on the tab. It arguably makes far more sense to have this strong relationship represented by containing the URL field in the tab itself rather than having a global URL field in one part of the window with content that changes as different tabs are selected in another part of the window.
That makes sense, however, I don't spend time looking at the URL. I look at the tab titles much more than I ever look at URL's. Additionally, to the common user the URL is a mysterious, meaningless thing anyway. They are more concerned with what the title of the page is.
Having to look over and past the URL bar to see what the title is, or having to look over the URL bar to select a tab, then back down past the URL bar to the page is less efficient visually.
I'm sure there are pros to the tab placement in Chrome, just as there are cons. Personally, it just isn't for me.
Good point. The cables only provide evidence that the US government captured and tortured this one particular innocent guy in Europe using their network of black sites, European prisons, and secret prisoner transportation networks. There's a ton of circumstantial evidence that they in fact used this infrastructure to kidnap and torture a whole bunch of other innocent people, but the current batch of cables doesn't prove that by itself.
I'm a 30-somthing urban professional and almost no one I know still uses MSN or AIM. Tons of people use gchat and gmail, including people who used facebook first. Looking at my adium contacts right now, there are more people signed into gchat than facebook chat, only one signed into MSN and AIM.
My wife's friends are the same way. Sure, lots of them have facebook accounts, but all of her friends and business contacts, new and old, email and gchat regularly. She doesn't even have a facebook account yet and has no intention of ever setting one up.
In fact, I feel less pressure to use facebook these days than I did a year or two ago. I don't even go on it anymore other than when I'm working on apps that use the graph api. My wall is filled with stuff I don't care about and if I want to contact someone I email, chat or text them.
Regarding the outsourcing thing, it's clear that even they aren't getting high quality. I'm checking out their Convert Units app, for instance, and the drum scrolling and selection is totally broken, although it works just enough to still function.
It's interesting, however, that the poor quality apparently isn't stopping people from using it. Part of it might be that people don't expect much out of a free app, so if it's broken they just deal with it.
Even the functionality of the drum is iffy. It seems like maybe a quarter of the time it will somehow mysteriously wind up on something other than what you selected.
Honestly, I think these "Ask HN: X vs X?" posts should be strongly discouraged here. The Rails vs Django threads get posted at least once a month, often more frequently, and it's beyond tiresome. They already get flagged and killed half the time, but people still post in them as if it's totally normal to have the same question posted week after week.
Edit: Instead of downvoting, explain why you think this same discussion needs to be rehashed month after month, sometimes week after week. When it comes to other topics we have no problem reminding people to search HN rather than ask the same questions repeatedly.
Have to say I disagree here....both frameworks are evolving over time and it's good to get a current comparison, as answers from 6-12 months ago may not be relevant anymore.
I agree with danieldon, it used to be interesting and fun to read such comparisons, but after a while, I've begun to notice that comments became more and more similar almost to the point of regurgitation.
And I'm going to refer to my comment from that discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830895