While I'm in the posting mood, thought I'd mention http://local.live.com. Once again, Microsoft is relying on someone else to do their R&D. For a company that spends more money on Research than any other company in the world, you would think they would be a little more innovative than to rely on netscape/apple/google to create something and then blatantly steal it. I'm not knocking MS too much, after all, if it weren't for them, I'd have a different career lined up. Local.live.com is part of their new "LIVE"! suite of web 2.0 knock-off stuff. Local.live is basically the web version of GoogleEarth. I know that Virtual Earth from MS has been around a long time, but it takes someone like google to actually make it cool, then microsoft realizes that they are desperately behind in the "cool factor" area and plays catch up. Local.live.com does have some nice birds-eye view functionality that google earth doesn't have yet. I'm sure in the next few years, you'll have fully rendered full 3d fly thrus from every angle in these applications. Till then, they'll both be trying to one-up each other.

While I'm in the psuedo-knocking mode of Microsoft.. I thought I'd mention that I was "selected" to beta test the webmail portion of Live.com. This site basically will replace hotmail.com at some point in the future. What's it like, you may ask? Well, take Outlook Web Access, make it slower, take away the filters and functions you already have with hotmail and Outlook, and call it Beta. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely an improvement over hotmail, but that's a bit like saying "I'd prefer to have my eyes gouged out with a cold knife instead of a hot one". I don't understand why they don't just put the code from Outlook Web Access as the front end to the hotmail mailboxes. The best part I can tell so far is that I can delete the spam, which makes up about 99.9% of my hotmail email, much quicker than I could before. I'm keeping GMail as my primary email app.