Cyberchatter: Arun Katiyar


	April 3, 2000

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CYBER CHATTER
Do you have Mail?

By Arun Katiyar

India Today issue dated April 3, 2000 Three and a half years ago, web-based e-mail was unheard of. Today, the first thing most new Net users do is create a web-based e-mail account of the kind Hotmail has to offer. This, despite the fact that many would already have pop (Post Office Protocol) accounts of the kind VSNL and Satyam provide.

OTHER COLUMNS

Web-based e-mail, first developed by a company called Seattle Lab, permits surfers to create their own user names and password without a complicated configuration procedure. Compare this with pop mail or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP, used largely by educational institutions), where an administrator must create e-mail accounts before users can use them. In fact, the technological complexity of IMAP and pop in addition to weak security (in most cases, pop sends out passwords as text over the Internet, making it difficult to secure), ensures that web-based e-mail continues to find favour even with it heads within organisations.

Personally, I feel that web-based e-mail is going to dominate life because it uses html. Even Microsoft, which spent several years trying to develop a monopoly on the desktop interface with Windows, ultimately opted for an "active desktop" where a web browser operates your PC. The other driver for this is the fact that moving applications to the web provides better control and reliability, and e-mail is the perhaps the first application to move from client to server because of the intense demand for mail.

India Today Group Online has just launched a web-based e-mail service called MailMeToday. Log into www.mailmetoday.com and try it. It compares well with other web-based e-mail services offered by Indian portals. And it has some features that are leagues ahead of the rest: for example, you can pick up mail from five other pop accounts from MailMeToday itself. Additionally, the more you use MailMeToday, the more points you get. These can be redeemed for exciting gifts like perfumes, jackets, entry to discotheques, hair dryers, books, music, lipsticks and cassette players. All put together, it makes MailMeToday easily the best of breed and I can see many people switching mail boxes. My young and enthusiastic colleague Amitabh Thakur, who runs MailMeToday, says he has enjoyed developing the service. "But," says Amitabh, "The ideas have just begun to come." Clearly Thakur has plans of taking MailMeToday towards previously uncharted territory. Hang in there.

HOME-GROWN
One of the reasonably well-informed sites on ayurveda is www.ayurved-online.com. Here you can fill in a health history form and an ayurveda doctor will respond to your question. However, Ayurved-Online's many spelling mistakes don't inspire too much confidence in the site. Maybe, it's a good idea for the medical community to come together and figure out a way of certifying such sites.

SMILE
Dr S. Umre has a smart list of patients. Among them, apparently, is Shah Rukh Khan. The dentist recently launched his site at www.dentalaesthetics.com -- a dinky site with a logo that will make you smile. A link allows you to send Umre a picture of yourself -- along with some comments -- that can help him enhance your smile.

LISTEN
RADIO SONICNET
Where can you go and say, "I wanna listen to Jai Uttal, Zap Mama, Anam, Digable Planets, Busta Rhymes, Snoopy Doggy Dogg, Paula Cole, Duane Allman, Santana, Khadja Nin and Grover Washington Jr, one after another. NOW."? No radio station on earth, no deejay anywhere, no juke box on the planet can serve up such diverse music at a moment's notice. But on the Net this is not an impossible task. At Radio Sonicnet (www. sonicnet.com), for example, within two minutes you can create your own play sequence from a vast list of styles and songs. The more you interact with the station, the more accurately it follows your taste. For example, if a track by Hiroshima (World Music), One Wish, is playing and you say, "Play this artiste less often" the site will actually serve up Hiroshima tracks less than the default setting. If you don't have the time for all this (question: what are you doing here anyway?), just click to a generic station, say, Suicide Machine Radio or Christian Rock and listen on.

USEFUL SERVICE
How much of the Net is flash and how much is of real utility? Try www.indianblooddonors.com, where you can search for blood banks, doctors and blood donors citywise (right now only Durg, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Nagpur). You can also ask medical questions related to fitness, pregnancy, childcare, weight loss, etc, which will be answered by experts from the related fields. Other sections offer a chance to acupuncturists, nephrologists and just about all kinds of doctors to list their resumes and look for placements.

Arun Katiyar is the chief operating officer of India Today Group Online. His e-mail address is akatiyar@india-today.com

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