Perspectives

It is the 200 and odd product question. Which is the best Yahoo service ? A little while ago, I created this list on Amazon Unspun. Flickr is my personal best. Nothing comes close. I also tend to use gmail more because I got my favourite id shivku with them. I also hate messenger for the simple fact that it is so heavy on my computer for nothing.

Anyways, the rest of the world seems to think otherwise. As it stands, Y! Mail beats them all by far. If you still havent voiced your preference, head over to the list and say what you think.

I came across Amazon’s unspun via Keshava’s entry. Quite an interesting idea. I dont completely understand their ranking algorithm though. Nor do I understand how they get those numbers (in the brackets). But assuming they have some funky way of doing it ( and hopefully better than digg, without the local maxima and not being influenced by a few power users problems):

They have not solved the fundamental problem that plagues the other web2.0 wonder – tags. How do u represent one sort of information in just one way ?

For instance, in this list of best pubs in bangalore, you got styx twice. One with an “M.G.Road” and the other without. I am not sure if there is a styx elsewhere, but irrespective, I can always spell “Anjelina Jolie” instead of “Angelina Jolie” in the woman you would leave your girl for list. They, ofcourse, do some sort of a normalization and also suggest item even as you type. But that doesnt help completely.

Anyways, as purple blood streams through my body, I have created “Best Yahoo service” over there. Go check it out, add and rate them.

update, which is pretty cool, I think:
From unspun’s FAQ:
List items have a computed score based on the number of people who have ranked the item and at what position it was ranked. We’ve indexed the score so that the 3rd item is always 1000. Items that are ranked higher and lower have their scores adjusted accordingly. This allows for general comparison of top items across lists. For example, if George Bush is the top item in a list with a score of 6914 and Angelina Jolie is the top item in another list with a score of 3118, and Verizon is the top item in a third list at 1427, you can deduce that George Bush holds a stronger first ranking, compared to other items on that list, than Angelina Jolie and Verizon in their respective lists.